Chunk of change

Snooping around after hearing from Malloy about the Ellesmere Island ice shelf breakup in northern-most Canada, I found this tell-tale crack via Google Earth:

The approximate size matches that reported of 66 square kilometers. Some concerned soul got there a little bit early and left a community note.

Update: That location appears wrong. Elsewhere I found the Ayles Ice Shelf as positioned at the northernmost part of the island, Latitude: 82.83333, Longitude: -80.56667. Google Earth has very low resolution here, and whatever broke off would look like a sliver.

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The melting of the icebergs that this chunk created will further displace sea-levels elsewhere. Consider the island of Lohachara where the Ganges river empties into the Bay of Bengal. With little fanfare it recently sunk below the water-line.

The uppermost arrow points to the island where apparently 10,000 residents once lived (10,000 people per km²?). The lower arrow I believe points to the uninhabited island of Suparibhanga (or Bedford?), which now looks like a submerged sandbar from the satellite photos.

Monbiot

I finished George Monbiot's latest "Heat" and so will offer up a classic quote. This vaguely biblical one-liner references the amazing amount of energy waste that goes into keeping grocery stores operating:

But though you walk through valleys of ice, you remain warm.

And one for the bonus round:

Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it.

I consider it a fairly upbeat read, and with the U.N. downward revising global warming impact by 25%, Monbiot's recommendations might hit their targets with a hip, thanks to some creative bookkeeping by the blue helmeted ones.

Update: Big Gav has commentary on a recent Monbiot article here, which I must admit provoked me to finish the book.

Glass

The lack of snow and mild winter in The North Country has caused the lakes to freeze up in sheets of perfect glass. I put on new bindings on my clap skates and have had several good outings. Mother nature's layout artist doesn't permit me to get from point A to point B by skates alone, but one can always dream.

Imagine this scene without the rescue workers. Watch out for those creek inlets!

The Conun Drum

From a post on The Oil Drum, Rapier pondered the mysteries of reserve growth.

I've hinted at this before, but I wanted to nail a simple idea centered around reserve growth. As a premise, let me create a hypothetical situation. Say starting from right now, i.e. Time=0, we find a growth in reserves that goes like 1/(Time+k), where "k" is some small number to keep the starting number finite. Let's say that this reserve growth falls in the provable category to indicate that we can extract it.

Three interesting results spring from this premise.

1. The amount of reserve left from now until eternity sums to an infinite number. This derives from a property of integrating a hyperbola (1/Time) over all of time. In other words, we get a URR of infinity.

2. If production follows a rate proportional to the current reserves (the classic "greed is good" assumption which explains man's and the free market's capitalistic instincts), the position of peak won't change too much. This has everything to do with rate considerations; the rate of reserve growth cannot match consumption rates, and new discoveries clearly continue to dwindle.

And most importantly, the one thing that explains Rapier's puzzlement.

3. The draw-down from reserves can become vanishingly small in this scenario. Taking finite production from an infinite pool leads to the conundrum that we will continue to extract an infinitesimal fraction of that eventually available.

I consider the argument quite subtle, so that if interpreted incorrectly, it gives ammunition to the cornucopians, who can assert that huge reserves lay in wait. However, in reality, since oil depletion occurs proportionally to current reserves, we end up seeing the classic effect of "diminishing returns". Of course this has real ramifications for a continuously growing energy-based global GDP economy, but the cornucupians will not spin it that way. They instead point to a continuously finite reserve that doesn't get drawn down by as much as one's expectations can intuit.

The above figure shows an extraction term corresponding to an exponential and a reserve growth indicated by a 1/(T+k) function. The convolution of the two -- shown below¹ -- roughly gives an idea of the overall extraction. (A variation of this forms the basis of the oil shock model)

Having to face and account for this argument, a cornucopian would have to propose a reserve growth rate that will keep pushing the peak into the future. Unfortunately, this would result in a growth even more aggressive that the 1/Time variant, which already has an infinite URR ! Fortunately, anyone actually proposing such a growth rate puts themselves in a situation of endless mockability.

We have to continue to question the numbers because otherwise we fall into the logical conundrum B.S. traps that politicians and corporations and scam artists have historically used to try to separate us from our money. Simple thought experiments like I have shown here remain one of the few options that we have to eliminate the rhetorical arguments from the public discourse.

As a recent and complementary example of where people have gotten hoodwinked in this fashion, google the "infinite horizon" argument to escalating Social Security costs. Bush's people have actually suggested huge future costs of S.S. based solely on a hidden assumption of an "infinite horizon". It takes time for the economists to dig this stuff out of the rhetorical arguments, but by that time the spinners have inflicted the damage and people get a completely misleading impression of the issue. I remember hearing Al Franken debunk this argument quite effectively by saying that, "yes we may have a huge SS deficit, but will have infinite time to pay it off, so it looks like our current funding is no problem". Touche.

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¹ Spreadsheets don't have a convolution function as far as I have found, but as a trick that Khebab would appreciate, use the Fourier transform on each function, do a complex multiplication, and then do an inverse transform on the result. This does the convolution effectively, albeit in a round-about way.

Alaska Peak

The following data from Laherrere brings up some interesting issues to contemplate with regards to depletion modeling.

Oil companies discovered oil in Cook Inlet (Swanson River) in 1957 and on the North Slope (Prudhoe Bay) in 1968. I found a forecast for North Slope of 22.3 billion barrels and a total extraction of 1.06 billion for Cook Inlet.

For North Slope I used the discovery date and the forecast as a stimulus to the oil shock model, and added the Cook Inlet model separately. For North Slope, I used values for fallow, construction, maturity, and extraction of 0.15 and for Cook Inlet, I used values of 0.2. The shock model production curve looked like:

I found it interesting that a strong discovery stimulus with typical rates adequately describes the curve:

In spite of the conflict between the stochastic premise of the model and the determinism implicit in a single field, the shape largely matches -- except for one significant area. Production only commenced on Prudhoe in 1977, as soon as workers completed the Alaska Pipeline. So we see a sudden surge in production in the actual curve around 1977 which does not show up in the shock model. Since companies worked on construction of the rigs and pipeline in parallel, something has to give. I suppose that extracted oil prior to the completion of the pipeline might have got wasted or stored in reservoirs. Naturally this does not show up in production numbers but it has to pop out somewhere. Otherwise, one must suppress extraction until the pipeline opened up, which would have produced a large shock right around 1977 -- something entirely doable within the context of the oil shock model.

So if I leave the extraction rate at some small number like 0.01 until 1976 and then jump up to 0.15 in 1977, the model looks like this:

In general, a lot of this detail gets washed out as we take larger sets of reservoirs with varying discovery dates, yet the single set provides us with mucho insight -- without invalidating the fundamental premise of the shock model.

Produce

From a batch of purple Peruvian potatoes we got from the farmer's market came this odd trio:

In the bunch we found two stones the same size and look as a potato, and a real potato that looked like a cross between Mickey Mouse and Piglet.

Sleeping Gas

Barry McCaffrey looks displeased. An equally perturbed Edvard Munch screams from Google that CERA has paid money for the top spot on the query "Peak" "Oil". This ends up alerting everyone within earshot that "Peak Oil Theory Flawed".

A couple of Google pages in under Peak Oil, I noticed that Julian Cope's Head Heritage web site featured a peak oil article from last year. Cope, who started out as a Liverpudlian neo-punk, took leave of his senses for a while (check out the schizoid dual memoirs "Head-On/Repossesed"), and later became a music archivist and amateur druid archaeologist. I picked up his huge picture book "The Modern Antiquarian" several years ago and recommend it to anyone that enjoys visiting ancient UK sites. Drugs could have gotten Cope committed; fortunately he recovered and instead committed himself to undertaking some pretty interesting and intense pop-research. It looks like Cope has produced another massive picture-book, available soon called "The Megalithic European: The 21st Century Traveller in Prehistoric Europe".

I find this stuff more interesting than speculating what will happen in a post-peak economy. Just remember that what goes around comes around. And witness the fact that people have started habitating in well-preserved Star Wars movie sets. Non-fiction remains stranger than fiction.

Scratch Head Time

If you want to waste lots of time, fly around Google Earth and try to figure out weird geometries in isolated regions.

Anger is an Energy

As I engage in a decent workout run, I have no trouble listening to some idiotic, content-free spew such as Matt Drudge produces. Everyone knows that the old "hate-buzz" kicks in the adrenaline and provides a virtual sparring partner for one to triumph over. Drudge proved no-match tonight as he brought in the scientifically illiterate Oklahoma Senator James (Republican) Inhofe to discuss global warming topics. So I had two sparring partners, an idiot and an illiterate. At the end, Drudge dropped this bit of pseudo-Haiku, suggesting for us to "Look at Tahoe,"

Wasn't Tahoe an iceberg
that melted, or something,
I don't know. -- Matt Drudge

We really should not listen to these people. Earlier, Inhofe credited Drudge as the lone voice in the media promoting the anti-global warming message. Go ahead Senator, hitch your wagon to another scientifically illiterate idiot. Wheee.

I could be wrong
I could be right
...
Anger is an energy - PiL

Must think good thoughts. So I switched to the Trouble MP3 and listened to the latest by Royce.

MVRemix: What is it about girls on bikes?

Justus Roe: I don't know. You know what it is? It was me and Mestizo and Jaime from Royce walking around in Zurich. We were in the Red Light District. We were flabbergasted about the amount of beautiful girls riding their bikes around the city. We concluded that the bikes and a steady diet of yogurt made those girls so extra fresh. Every time a girl rides past me on a bike, I can't do anything but watch that sh*t. If I didn't, humans wouldn't be on earth. It's evolution.

More like it. Evolution always triumphs.

USA N.G. (Not Good)

I recently posted a model of USA natural gas production based on discovery data of Laherrere. This model assumed a constant depletion rate over time and fit the real production curve in scale only. I prefaced use of the model with the caveat that natural gas reservoirs may not necessarily deplete at a rate proportional to the amount left, which forms the underpinnings of the oil shock model. I imagine that a natural gas reservoir might deplete closer to an analogous water cooler, maintaining a steady flow until empty -- which conversely also means that one can throttle the rate presumably just as easily.

As the shock model does allow a variation of extraction rate over time, I decided to fit the production curve again, but this time letting the extraction rate vary all over the place.

As a first step I adjusted the (fallow,construction,maturation) rates down to 0.1 (10 year 1/e time) from the previous 0.133 to match the early evolution of the curve. Combining the static rates with the variable extraction rates I generated the following fit and error curve.


Remember that this pertains to conventional sources of natural gas; de Sousa covers the distinction between conventional and unconventional in a TOD post, but this goes in more detail. Other than that, it looks like we have started to squeeze the blood out of the proverbial turnip. I really think the increase in extraction rate comes from improvements in technology allowing us to more than maintain the flow in the face of increases in demand. Sucking out 10% per year of the volume worked fine for us for the better part of last century, but as we hit the 80% (!) level, hard constraints have to follow. And that means we will soon see the steep cliff typical of natural gas depletion. Why don't any of the news organizations talk about this? Do the energy companies figure that we will go quietly, whistling past the graveyard as these conventional sources of NG disappear? (pause for rhetorical interlude)

And remember the helium shortage during the recent Thanksgiving holiday? Guess where helium comes from? Certainly not unconventional sources of natural gas. Oh yeah .. reservoirs containing conventional natural gas. Double gulp. Not good.

Bye-bye toy balloons, hello bulbous LNG tankers.

Update: On reviewing my only other natural gas model, New Zealand NG shows the same characteristic upswing in extraction rate on nearing a cliff. Note that USA extraction rate more than doubles in a similar time frame.

USA N.G.

TOD:Europe has pulled together data from a recent Laherrere presentation here. TOD's Luis de Sousa concentrated on Laherrere's USA natural gas analysis and in particular the following chart.

Notice the obvious time-phased shadowing of the discovery curve by the production curve, and the implied reserve depletion that this portends. Albeit, some of the gloom gets abetted by the rise in unconventional NG deposits.

I haven't used the Oil Shock Model that much to predict natural gas production, partly because of the lack of discovery data and partly because of the supposed abrupt dynamics of natural gas reservoirs (e.g. do they really shut down that quickly at the end of their lifetime?). The latter issue might imply that we can't quite as confidently assume a depletion rate proportional to the volume as a first-order estimate. On the other hand, big reservoirs, like big aquifers, do produce quantitatively more than small ones, so this approximation holds some merit.

It mildly sucks that Laherrere likes to put a filter on his discovery profiles (see above figure, in this case, a 7-year average). The shock model would rather gobble up the raw data and generate a meaningful production profile. Indeed, I have tried it on New Zealand NG and see no reason that it wouldn't work on USA NG as well, caveats or not.

In any case, given the fact that Laherrere provided some kind of discovery data, I decided to give the USA conventional NG data a shot with the model. I chose fallow, construction, maturation, and depletion rates of 0.133/year (which is a fairly standard 7.5 year mean, in terms of oil depletion models) and I got the following dark line fit:


What do the 0.133 numbers physically mean? In a stochastic world, all it means that it takes, on the average, about 7.5 years to start work on a discovered field, 7.5 years to get construction finished, 7.5 years for it to reach maturation, and simultaneously factor in a depletion rate of 0.133 volume per year. The aggregation of these terms causes the discovery profile to shift approximately 23 years (according to Laherrere's opinion) to match the production profile. Understand that this analysis does not necessarily work on individual fields, but to first order (a Markovian process) it does explain everything you need to know on an aggregated set of fields, any one of which can vary according to its own specific parameters (i.e. how long it sat fallow, how long construction took, etc).

The deterministic, or shock, aspects to the model come about when political or economic effects are taken into account. Even though I did not add it to this particular model, rapid changes, due to collusion or world events or technology, can cause the extraction rate to adjust at certain points in the curve. This allows one to get insight into deviations from the general trend.

From the residual errors, you can see max deviations around depression/WWII, 1971, 1984, and 2000 (the stuff before 1920 looks made up as the line looks way too straight). I would consider these candidate time points for introducing changes in the extraction rate. Before doing that, though, I would love to remove that darn 7-year moving average -- like the people imprisoned by the Patriot Act, data needs freedom from shackles!

Out of the firewall, into the fireplace

The firewalled NYT article The End of Ingenuity at Thomas Homer-Dixon's web site.

Air America's Ecotalk had several interesting interviews today:

• Who killed the Electric Car?
• Biking in LA "I'm not worried about looking like a dork"
• Green CAD

I've heard rumors of major blood-letting and the cutting of several programs at AAR, shame if they get rid of this one.

Maron and Earl subbed for Sam Seder this morning, a great energy rant to start off the show and a few great bits, podcasts here.

Marc Maron: "Nothing can be done but to shift the entire energy paradigm"

And the Cardinal's Rapture Watch monitoring the end-times.

Jim Earl: "I told you how a burning squirrel suddenly appeared in the fireplace of a terrified family. The weeketh after that I told you how a naked man was pulled from the jaws of an alligator. And the weaketh after that I told you if you were going to throw a squirrel down your neighbor's fireplace, don't be surprised when they throw your drunken naked ass into the local alligator pond."

UK Models

Mearns at TOD penned an extensive review of the UK North Sea oil production decline along with some of his own models.

I placed the oil shock model from August 2005 on top of his TOD chart below:

The future bumps in some of Mearns model predictions come from new fields coming on line such as the Buzzard field discovered in 2001. This one barely got included in the discovery input for the oil shock model, but more recent discoveries such as Rosewood/Lochnagar in 2004 have not. The North Sea oil region more than anywhere else demonstrates how new discoveries remain the only way to halt the inexorable decline.

Byrne

The latest entry to the David Byrne Journal:

Do You Really Believe It'’s About Oil?
The War Of The Imagination

I also like to peruse on occasion Steve (The Church) Kilbey's blog The Time Being even though I usually can't follow his stream of consciousness.

Jon Wurster, erstwhile from Superchunk, puts together the funniest and unflappably driest radio comedy bits with cohort Tom Scharpling as straight man on Tom's WFMU radio show.

I went to see the legendary English Beat a few weeks ago. Dave Wakeling played of course (no Beat without him) but I did not realize the guy worked a dayjob for Greenpeace after his early career peaked. Interesting that he actually produced a solar-powered recording studio in 1994:

Unfortunately, alternative energy has a bad rap with a failed, '70s Carter administrative connotation to it, when in fact solar and wind power provide electricity for millions of homes in the U.S. now.

I have a penchant for "turning over the rocks" of musicians and bands that I enjoy, and constantly get surprised by the humanity behind the tunes.

No cigar

This falls under the "nice try" department. Khebab resurrected a derivation of a single reservoir oil depletion calculation and posted it in a TOD comment section here. I distinctly remember seeing this months ago, kind of dismissed it at the time, but now I have the benefit of a gestation period, so I took Khebab's bait and gave it a serious reconsideration.

As I understand it, the original analyst, Abrams, clearly wanted to see if he could get a Logistic style curve from the solution of the quasi-static fluid dynamics from a depleting reservoir. He tried his darndest, enlisting the aid of the Maple symbolic equation solver, but I think he mainly accomplished a further muddying of the waters. First off, I do buy the mathematical premises he set up, but he made a serious mistake in trying to create a good fit by varying the diameter of the bore hole, A(t), as a function of time. Eventually, it ended up looking like the middle green curve below:

What do you know, but the green curve itself looks like a Logistic, which basically subverts the whole analysis. For instance, I could have also created a Logistic peak if I assumed a constant flow of oil out of the reservoir and modulated the aperture with a diameter that follows a Logistic curve.

In retrospect Abrams should have taken this fundamental differential equation,

and looked for an inflection point due to a change in sign of the second derivative. If he did try, he wouldn't have found one because none exists, and in fact, the rate of change of volume monotonically changes, showing no signs of a Hubbert-like peak. Unless of course, he generated a contrived A(t) curve that does show a Hubbert peak!

Everyone makes mistakes, but this kind of stuff really irks me because of the sleight-of-hand that goes on. Granted, I like the original foundational premise, but somehow the agenda got hijacked to the temple of Hubbert.

As an interesting side-note, the fluid dynamics and hydrostatics described by Abrams' equations provides an interesting alternative to the diffusion model I set up previously (which arises from a statistical mechanics view of things). That derivation shows that reserve growth follows a square root law (contrarily called parabolic growth), and I have a suspicion that the actual Abrams curve lies closer to this one than a Logistic curve. In certain regimes, it looks like it goes like approximately t^2/3 instead of t^1/2. Worth another with the aid of a numerical solver.


Update: Luis de Sousa at TOD/Europe talked about the Gompertz curve as a possible Logistic replacement and one that shows asymmetry in peak shape. But once again, no cigar, as the long tail at minus infinity violate all rules of causality. Like the Logistic curve, it doesn't reflect any physical model and only serves as a potential empirical fit.

Fingered

TOD Europe directed me to a slashdot thread on Peak Oil, and some amazing (and sad) comments, IMO. First this bit of cornucopianism from someone nicknamed Rei

Why do you suppose that is?

Global warming. I'm not talking about political things like ANWR. The whole arctic is becoming much easier to drill in, and thus it lowers the cost of arctic oil.

Where did I hear that before? Oh yeah:

.. new areas opening up to exploration as, say, the Arctic seapack melts and makes more areas available ..

And it gets better; in a strange twist, Rei reveals his background here:

My father is a pres. of Shell USA and a VP of Shell Intl. Early last year, I was talking to him, and he mentioned that they were working on 4xing their tar sands production. It's becoming very profitable. It was a gamble when they started putting money into it, but it's looking to be a good investment.

Drill deep enough and we find that all oil company employees get the same talking points. And as someone pointed out in the comments, Shell has sadly resorted to astro-turfing nerd boards using their kids as trolls. How far they have fallen.

Trial Balloon

Strange, but if you google the terms "peak" "helium", you will arrive at yours truly blog as the first hit. But now we see the reality has come to bear, thanks to some cartoon characters and a bunch of Puritans.

Disaster averted for the moment, but parade planners should still worry. Helium gas suppliers claim that the old "inadequate refinery capacity" as the cause of the shortage (where have we heard that before? oh yeah).

Face it folks, as natural gas peaks, so will our helium supply and these shortages will become more prevalent until we start realizing that helium remains too valuable a resource to waste on parade balloons. Not one to completely dwell on the negative, and potentially disappoint all the children of the future, I suggest that we can always resort to alternatives.

So how about this idea? Let's hold Thanksgiving Day's parades at night and project hologram-like apparitions into the sky, and possibly use smog particulates to disperse the light.

Or, better yet, fill the balloons up with hydrogen and then we can combine Thanksgiving and 4th of July into one spectacular holiday.

Update: Tough times for the fish as well.

Oil production models

Khebab did a great job aggregating various oil depletion models to compare against November production numbers at TOD. He split them up according to "bottom-up" models and "curve-fitting" models, which seems like a smart and fresh way of doing things. My analysis falls in the curve fitting camp, so I have to thank him personally for allowing us amateurs to play with the big boys. FWIW, the Oil Shock model seems to follow most closely the ASPO-45 model for the next ten years.

P.S. The best unintentional Peak Oil cartoon ever.

Head too big, enlarge door

Since I attended the school, I can tell you that the ChemEng and MatSci departments at the University of Minnesota have a bit of an ego problem. Just because they get rated near the top doesn't excuse laughable comments like this one concerning new hydrolysis techniques:

"What Lanny does is sorcery," says Frank Bates, head of the chemical engineering and materials science department. "This is classic Minnesota chemical engineering in the tradition of understanding how to steer chemical reactions to get more of the products you want and less of those you don't."

Still, I would like to find out more about the techniques that Prof. Schmidt has dreamed up, as the problem he has claimed to have solved does sound intriguing.

What makes vegetable oil, sugars and starches so hard to turn into fuels is the fact that they don't evaporate when heated. As a drop of oil sits on a hot surface, its bottom layer is exposed to heat but not oxygen. In the absence of oxygen, the heat will break down the molecules of oil into water vapor and carbon "gunk" rather than into synthesis gas. A similar situation applies to crystals of sugar.

Morning Remembrance

A titan of the global pyramid scheme, economist Milton Friedman, collapsed and expired today. As a legacy he left behind the quite effective witholding tax, something that his wife chided him to no end.

Rest in peace Milton Friedman, big government's best friend.

No one should miss the person that Greg Palast called a "malevolent, dwarfish gnome".

Update: Some TCS dude complimented on Friedman on his competitive tennis game, of all things. Why that has relevance to economic theories -- save for his drive to win -- I can't say. Much like Don Rumsfeld, who has gotten accolades for his squash game, people can't say much about their good deeds and so play up the sports angle. Figures.

Up-Update-date: And this post goes way over the top.

Milton Friedman dignified a simplistic vision of economics, a vision so simplistic it could not but appeal to the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Thus began the popularization of the terms of extreme capitalism and the private ownership fetish.

Scaling ideas

An intriguing article on the origin of capacitance scaling limitations showed up in EE Times recently. In what seems almost an obvious and definitely late-arriving finding, a research team at UCSB claim that capacitance dielectric scaling fails at small thicknesses due to depolarizing of the interface layers. This happens at a scaling where it becomes a significant fraction of the dielectric layer itself. Although ostensibly applicable to microelectronics, the significance may find its way into the manufacture of compact energy storage caps. The caveat: we need lots of expensive gold and platinum electrode material whose high electron mobility counteracts the depolarizing effects.

(standard disclaimer: don't trust too much of the stuff written in trade journals like EE Times, especially in regards to explaining the fundamental physics)

A first?

I heard congressman-elect Jerry McNerney on Air America radio the other day, and host David Bender stated that the US has elected its first Mathematics PhD congressman. (Boehlert and Ehlers have physics degrees). McNerney has used his math education to good effect, running a wind energy company recently. Out of curiosity, I looked up his Phd Thesis at University of New Mexico, A (1,1) tensor generalization of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. A somewhat obscure topic, but it appears to have at least some applicability to 3D medical imaging.

But above all, we have begun to rid ourselves of the dread Pombo affliction. Mathematically eliminated but still squirming, he can still do some damage evidently.

Maybe he (Pombo) will also try to get Arctic drilling and some of his other bills through, in a last-minute, "Hail Mary" assault on the environment.

UK Oil Production

TOD/UK posted that UK Oil Production Lowest For 28 Years

Take a look at the following graph and you can see the trend:


The UK double humped peak has officially ended.

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On the plus side, Air America Radio did a great job reporting on the election tonight. Opposition party reporter/loyalist Lawton Smalls finally broke down over the airwaves. And most of the remaining pond scum on this side of the puddle has dried up. I feel happy for all the bloggers and radio hosts who have pushed for progressive candidates the past few years. We should finally see some progressive energy bills coming out of congress the next few years.

Odd lie

Today, one of the local radio shows (Captain Ed and Mitch) asked congressional candidate Michele Bachmann (R) how she has learned to handle attack ads so well. She responded by saying that she learned to fight back because she had 3 brothers and no sisters growing up. But then I recalled reading that her Brady Bunch-style family had 9 children among them, including at least one step-sister, while she attended high school. It took me a nanosecond to put 2 and 2 together to figure out why she lied on this statement. She then ended the interview with a thought that filled me with pride:

"You have the smartest listeners."

Considering that Bachmann positions herself as a morality/family-first candidate, her lying on such a basic personal fact ranks as one of the most hypocritical statements I have heard. This only further confirms what Chris Hedges documents as a severely twisted view of inclusiveness in 'minionists due to an extreme fundamentalist belief system.

According to the article, Bachmann apparently also has only a narrow grasp on issues outside of the so-called "moral" ones she supports. On the other hand, the radio hosts comically attacked the Lt. Governor candidate of Minnesota, Judi Dutcher (D), for not knowing the term "E85". I find this funny because these bloggers cum radio hosts rarely if ever discuss issues related to energy alternatives, whereas the Democrats go to lunch on this subject matter. I classify this tactic as a case of projection and inoculation to prevent voters from understanding their own vacuousness on these issues.

If you vote against hypocrisy, can detect psychological framing tactics, and strive to find a level accountability, you can't go wrong in choosing the right candidate.

Update: The station replayed the radio program so I snagged the audio to YouTube:

Stupor

I used to routinely listen to Limbaugh years ago during lunch breaks (for the hatebuzz) and then one day I went cold turkey. Kevin Drum indicates that he may have snapped out of a stupor than has gone on longer than my ongoing dittohead detoxification.

Bush: Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you. I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East. I am worried that rival forms of extremists will battle for power, obviously creating incredible damage if they do so; that they will topple modern governments, that they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West. People say, "What do you mean by that?" I say, "If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.

Rush called this "extremely visionary." It's certainly a bracing call to arms for our troops overseas, isn't it?

Critical Ass

I saw this stunt in a wilderness survival movie once.

Once a month, cyclists gather at Balboa Park and ride around San Diego to promote bicycle-powered transportation. Critical Mass is held in dozens of cities around the country, and when it’s large enough—when it reaches a critical mass—the group often blocks the road and ignores traffic rules in order to assert bicycle independence.

Last Friday, someone decided to express his displeasure with the two-wheeler slowdown. The rage occurred on Broadway near the Gaslamp Quarter.

"These two guys in a black Mercedes were talking shit out the window, wouldn’t turn off the road," said one rider, Jody Polk. "They got surrounded by bicycles, making threats out the window. There was some egging on on both sides."

The banter apparently got serious, because, according to witnesses, the two guys jumped out of the car, possibly ready for a fight. But Polk suspects the pair changed their strategy when they turned and saw 100 or so riders coming down Broadway toward them. That was when one of them pulled "a large pistol" and fired it into the air before getting back into the car and speeding off.

October Surprise

The vaunted "October Surprise" turned out as none other than the porcine Karl Rove.

Otherwise, the day's events happened to contain a bunch of interesting media twists.

• Radio talk show caller Mike Stark getting pummeled by George Allen's stooges.
• ABC's Mark Halperin trying to brown-nose radio wing-nut Spew Spewitt for 3+ hours before realizing that the Spew has some serious character flaws. "Hugh, did you have some bad childhood experience?"
• Brave Stephanie Miller calling up a stalker on-air who essentially threatened to kill her in a creepy monospace-typed letter.
• Kerry getting ballsy and Bush getting stupider.
• A weird ABC radio network memo claiming an advertising blacklist on Air America Radio.

On the last item, I sent in a question to one of the companies allegedly involved in the advertising blackout, REI co-op. An outdoors store known for their liberal causes, I figured that they would give us the real scoop about the "REI Sporting Goods (sic)" involvement with ABC. They returned my query with a form letter within minutes of me sending it.

"Thank you for contacting REI regarding the Air America advertising blackout.

Today, an internal memo on ABC Network letterhead was posted on the Air America website and picked up by various blog sites. The memo lists companies that refused to have their radio advertising supporting Air America and Al Franken?s programming. REI was listed as one of the companies declining to advertise; however this information is incorrect.

REI has not refused to advertise during Air America?s programming. In fact, REI has placed radio ads on stations carrying Air America programming.

It is unfortunate that this misinformation has been widely distributed. We are currently working with our advertising agency and the ABC radio network to track down how this happened.

You are a valued member and I hope you will give us another opportunity to serve your future outdoor needs.

Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Carolyn
REI Online Customer Service"

customer-service@rei.com

In the meantime, erstwhile Air America host Marc Maron and second banana Jim Earl made a triumphant return to the AAR airwaves and guest hosted the Springer show last week, hijacking the first hour with talk about energy efficient transportation alternatives [listen here]. The rumor mill has it that Maron may join fellow AAR outcast Mike Malloy on the NovaM radio network, and may also go over to Sirius satellite radio. Malloy had a great rant on how Bush has gone from his self-proclaimed role of King of America to King of the World, but eventually a caller had to correct this title and extend it to King of the Universe with the new Bush space policy.

Update: I sent the REI memo to Mike Malloy for an appraisal. Nothing gets past him as he replied succintly:

" In fact, REI has placed radio ads on stations carrying Air America programming."
Weasel words, as always. No one said these advertisers wouldn't advertise on STATIONS that carried Air America programming. The charge is they refused to be on Air America PROGRAMS.

Bastards.

MM

Foolish deficiency

The Toecutter provides a list of fuel-efficient cars that the USA will never allow consumers buy.

Statistical Easterbrook

Atrios said:

Probably the stupidest person in professional pundtry is Gregg Easterbrook. He's exhibit A for "too stupid to know he's stupid" and more than that he's too stupid to understand that there are people who know things that he doesn't, and more than that he's so stupid that he sets himself up as an authority about things he has absolutely zero comprehension of. It'd be comical except he's helping to make even more people as stupid as he is and what we don't need right now is even more stupid people.

An early science blogger, most people consider Easterbrook particularly weak in relation to this aspect of his punditry. But I did not realize that he has had a parallel career as a sports columnist. Which makes this passage particularly troubling.

The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have dismissed the Lancet study, and they should. It's gibberish.

How somebody that writes a column about a statistical exercise such as competitive sports can not understand simple concepts such as sampling and extrapolation should really give up any hope of enlightenment. In his heart he probably thinks when a quarterback has a completion percentage of 50%, his passes make it only halfway to their target. And that the conceptual premise of sports betting likely equally baffles him. (He also makes stuff up, because no where does the Lancet say that exactly 654,965 people died)

Alas, hope springs eternal in the world of mindless sports zealots; as an antidote, we need more intelligent sports writing refugees like Keith Olbermann, Charles Pierce, and Dave Zirin branching out and not the typical dunderheads like Easterbrook.

Perils for Pedestrians

Tuesday, October 24, DISH Network will show Episode 81 of "Perils For Pedestrians".

Contents of Episode 81 (2003):

• We talk with Linda Armstrong Kelly (ed: Lance's ex ?) about The Texas Bicycle Coalition at the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC.
  

• We meet Greg Lemond, a three time winner of the Tour De France.

• U.S. Representative James Oberstar gives the history of federal transportation policy.

DISH Network Channel 9411 -- The Universityhouse Channel
Tuesday -- 9:30 pm Eastern, 6:30 Pacific

Google Video
Note: Episode 81 is not yet available on Google Video.

Public Access Cable Stations
Note: Public access cable channels are showing different episodes than DISH Network.

The Klobuchars

I hope local yokel Amy Klobuchar gets the vote for US Senate instead of the cross-eyed toadie Mark Kennedy. Klobuchar has huge name recognition in Minnesota, partly because of her father's popularity as a newspaper columnist, environmentalist, and radio host. Jim Klobuchar, a former sportswriter for the Minneapolis StarTribune, wrote one of my favorite columns of all time, essentially lifting the veil for me behind the marketing of sports team "homerism". His main premise still holds true: if sports writers never wrote up close and personal stories documenting athletes' private lives, no sports fan would ever care which team wins or loses. Every big-time sporting franchise would lose a significant fraction of their die-hard fanatics because the players would become nameless automatons.

I use to live and die according to the machinations of the Twins and Vikings, but no more. But by effortlessly ignoring whatever some sports hack writes about a millionaire ballplayer going to some children's hospital as a charitable action, I brush off the success or failure of my hometown teams.

Klobuchar wrote about a taboo topic -- that which no sane (i.e. gutless) sports writer should talk about. That kind of journalistic honesty rarely shows up in the big media and in his own way spoke truth to power.

Oh and by the way, Amy Klobuchar, as a Democrat, understands all the important energy issues that a Republican's corporate and 'minionist walking papers would never reveal. I trust she also inherited some of her father's honesty and integrity, and will speak truth to power in much the same way.

Obvious

Unlike a significant fraction of the population, I don't have a hard time understanding why academics vote progressive -- apparently some 3/4 of the time. Instapundit claims it occurs because of a lack of "diversity". What he attributes to group-think of some sort, I actually believe amounts to intelligence and plain logic mixed with critical thinking. In other words, things you learn at the university level.

This number does not differ much from a report released last year, and with the possibility of even higher numbers on the elite campuses.

And it goes back even further:

At the birth of Western culture, a teacher called Socrates was executed for filling "young people's heads with the wrong ideas."

Khebab plots

Khebab at TOD (linked via Big Gav) presented a range of peak estimates all on one plot.

I placed the Oil Shock Model data as stars on the graph. My estimate -- based on discovery data -- remains on the pessimistic side, agreeing largely with the ASPO data from October 2004 and Bakhtiari from 2003 (both using conventional plus NGL as the production total). ASPO has since upwardly corrected their estimates, something that I have really no basis for, as discoveries have not gone up much since late 2004.

Non-linear thinking curve fitting

Someone at TOD came up with the eyeball fit to the peaking of world oil production:


In the category of other weird statistical anomalies, the peakoil.com site shows up in the top 50 energy sites -- today 3 down from Chevron.

And who else but David Byrne should provide us the latest thinking in bicycle transportation. Mr. Byrne went to a talk by the former mayor of Bogota, Columbia:

One common measure of the cleanliness of a mountain stream is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.

When I was elected mayor of Bogotá and got to city hall, I was handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300 million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. [more than 20km!] It may seem crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren’t even paved. But we chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We’re telling people, “You are important — not because you’re rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human.” If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.

...

• “If a bike lane that isn’t safe for an 8 year old child it isn’t a bike lane.”
• “Traffic jams are not always bad. The priority is not always to relieve them. They will force people to use public transportation.”
• “Building more highways never relieves congestion.” (This was not his insight, but he reminded us how true it is.)
• “Transportation is not an end — it is a means to having a better life, a more enjoyable life — the real goal is not to improve transportation but to improve the quality of life.”
• “A place without sidewalks privileges the automobile, and therefore the richer people in cars have more rights; this is undemocratic.”

Worst Candidate

If former Minnesota Senator Rod Grams (R) succeeds in uprooting incumbent congressman Jim Oberstar (D) in Minnesota's 1st district, I will likely go into convulsions. The district covers northern Minnesota and includes Duluth, the scenic "Arrowhead", north shore of Lake Superior, Boundary Waters wilderness, and Voyagers National Park.

The potential convulsion-inducing issue statements that I heard Grams recite today include:

1. The claim that Oberstar overspends on bicycling paths in the district. (Not that a congressman has any control over actual spending, so this must mean pork -- a very lean form of pork apparently)
2. The claim that northern Minnesota industry can generate ethanol out of the abundant poplar trees growing in the region
3. Lower taxes can bring back iron mining (which essentially ended over 20 years ago)

Grams' ethanol breakthrough will apparently generate a new industry for the district's citizens, who commonly refer to the poplar trees as aspen.

Sounds like a good idea: cut down the other hardwoods and conifers, then plant and harvest fast-growing poplars which will rapidly leech the soil, initiate strip mining to capture the rest of the locked-in iron ore, and everyone will want to visit and ride on the scenic biking paths. Who wouldn't want to see an imitation lunar landscape, decimated for your convenience and available at a fraction of the cost of the original?

Update: I found an independent opinion on Oberstar's respect for bicycling, and of his legislative methods.

During his little speech, Oberstar shared a little story about how he wanted to insert some pro-cycling language into some transportation bill, but he lacked the support of his colleagues to do it. So he got one of his staffers to write it up in such a way that nobody would understand it, and inserted it into the bill unnoticed, and it passed.

Poll

Tom Friedman has worked his way back to the idea of energy independence.

Coming in No. 1, with 42 percent, was "reducing dependence on foreign oil." Coming in a distant second at 26 percent was "combating terrorism." Coming in third at 25 percent was "the war in Iraq," and tied at 21 percent were "securing our ports, nuclear plants and chemical factories" and "addressing dangerous countries like Iran and North Korea." "Strengthening America's military" drew 12 percent. Mr. Carville also noted that because their polls are of "likely voters," they have a slight Republican bias — i.e., they aren’t just polling a bunch of liberal greens.[PDF poll]

Unfortunately, I believe this particular poll suffers from a lack of orthogonality. Too many of the concerns rely on combatting terrorism, which essentially ends up splitting the vote N-ways. But if Tom Terrific has spotted a trend, bet that it gets promulgated far and wide.

Role models

First Bush showed a keen mid-life interest in bicycling. Now he has transferred that interest to disgraced congressman Mark Foley. Talk about your good role models for the next Floyd Landis, errrr, I mean Lance Armstrong.

GraphFoley

To weave a web of deception...

EEstor

I happened across an interesting post on the promise of ultracapacitor startup EEstor at Ezra Klein's site. Guest poster John raises a few interesting questions and a commenter gets the last word in. The latter reminds us that 1/2 the energy stored in a capacitor eventually gets wasted. I rolled this assertion around in my head for a bit and essentially come to the same conclusion. If you consider that any power source has an internal resistance (R1=r) that must eventually get balanced by an external resistive sink (R2=R), the most efficient power transfer occurs when r=R.

P=I*V=I*(I*R)=I²R

P=(V/(r+R))²R

dP/dR = 0 when r=R

Reduce r and you have to reduce R to get the current up. Increase r and you have to increase R to generate a significant voltage drop. And since equal amounts of power get consumed internally and externally when r=R, only 1/2 becomes usable for an application.

The same principle follows from audio amplifiers having an internal impedance designed to match that of your typical speaker (8 ohms). Half the power gets lost as heat emanating from your amplifier.

Another reminder that energy storage devices by themselves do not save us from dealing with the real issue at hand:

But these are all forms of energy storage, not sources of energy on their own. The primary form of energy for the United States would still, even if every car had one of these EEStor capacitors in it, still be coal and oil. (We could use a lot less, but still.) The objective still has to be reducing the amount of oil we use to avoid Peak Oil (whenever it happens, better to prepare early.) Quite aside from Peak Oil, climate change requires that we stop using fossil carbon altogether. Storage technologies, exciting as they are, are not by themselves the answer.

Update: The anonymous commenter has a good point, but consider that big-money military rail gun development and other directed energy weapons has predominantly funded the development of ultracapacitors. Here, and in other applications (like the Tesla Roadster racing) where you need huge amounts of instantaneous power, power extraction efficiency remains important. All those fast discharge losses add up. But I'm happy to see designs get above 80% efficiency (charge+discharge). I have to admit that I must have retained little from the switching power supply class I took in grad school circa 1986.

link

A Modest Proposal

So the Neocons started with a plan, a plan theoretical on paper and untested in practice. The Neocons now actually have lots of plans, all likely doomed to failure.

Then we read this:

Iraq terrorist calls scientists to jihad

Al-Qaida-in-Iraq's leader, in a chilling audiotape released Thursday, called for nuclear scientists to join his group's holy war and urged insurgents to kidnap Westerners so they could be traded for a blind Egyptian sheik who is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison.

The fugitive terror chief said experts in the fields of "chemistry, physics, electronics, media and all other sciences — especially nuclear scientists and explosives experts" should join his group's jihad, or holy war, against the West.

So's I've got my own plan, played around in my mind and show-room-floor modeled in this blog post. Rather concisely, my plan involves targetting all the scientists and engineers in fundamentalist, rapture-ready societies for special attention. I see the danger as too great and the consequences too dire for us to sit back and allow the leaders of these countries to try to advance their nuclear weapons capability. So the special attention I recommend involves a combination of (1) scaring the bat-sh*t out of every engineer that dares to get involved in the work and/or (2) actually rooting those people out with whatever means at our disposal.

I base my plan on the premise that engineers and scientists everywhere have enough technical acumen and awareness to understand current events. I presume some fraction of these educated folks would quickly comprehend that the civilized world has placed a huge bounty on their heads and would act accordingly. As an engineer myself, and associating with other engineers for years, I know that cowards and self-centered bastards fill our ranks -- independent of country of origin. The minute they get wind of Western society's plans to eliminate their line of work, entire development teams would start to disintegrate. They would quickly disperse like sheets to the wind. I find it hard to believe that the remaining engineers, no matter how intense their jihadist beliefs, could continue building nuclear weapons in their basement.

It really would not take much effort to throw a huge wrench in the works of any fundie-ruled country if we put such a plan in place. Why bomb a weapons plant when you could easily accomplish the same thing with psy-ops and special forces?

I could put the shoe on the other foot, and think how this would effect me if we turn the tables, and I and my fellow American engineers and scientists became targetted for the same treatment. Echoing Bush, I would say "bring it on". Deep down I believe that technologists that don't pursue rapture-relief objectives have a bit more cajones to stay the course. The other side would sooner piss their pants than support a cause that all their education contraindicates.

Guarantee that if we put such a plan in place, our fear of weapons of mass destruction (at least of the nuclear kind) would soon dissipate. Put the producers of the TV show 24 in charge, give them some funding, and we needn't worry. High tech weapons such as these do not exist without a stable cadre of well-educated technologists running the show. We could then start worrying about nuclear-equipped places like Pakistan that have ambiguous motivations for keeping their arsenal.

And before anyone criticizes my plan, just consider how much the Neocons have accomplished with their own brilliant plans. Not.

Wind Projection

I missed this news item when it came out earlier in the summer, but Air America's EcoTalk resurrected the issue of the military opposing new wind turbine projects because of potential radar interference. Even though some projects recently obtained a go-ahead, it still boggles my mind how the military can't resist taking a stupid pill and instead simply wiseup and drop the proposal.

Looking at the issue from the perspective of an engineer, I can say that no way will windmills cause interference that would overcome the abilities of a experienced radar technician to filter out. The turbines operate at a fixed (or at least very slowly varying) frequency which means that a straightforward notch filter should remove unwanted signals. After such filtering, radar should not experience a problem from phantom motion interference at all.

And I don't buy this rationale either:

A bureaucratic delay was created by a provision in a congressional bill that wind energy companies say was drafted to create more hurdles for a high-profile and controversial offshore wind project near Nantucket, Mass.

The law required the Department of Defense to issue a report assessing the impact that development of wind turbines would have on military radar.

No way. This has got BushCo fingerprints all over it and they have followed the first law of projection by blaming the opposition for their own actions.

Canadians determined to strike

Somebody¹ decided that the area known as the Northwest Angle in northern Minnesota has turned into a potential security hole for terrorists arriving from Canada.

The northern-most arrow indicates traffic funneling through Minnesota's last one-room schoolhouse.


Watch the web cam at Flag Island for suspicious behavior. If you see anyone leaving by boat without a fishing pole please contact authorities immediately.

---

¹Overheard on an Air America Radio news report, but have found no verification from online news sources. (Update: Link)

Ultra Theory

Big Gav has raised an interesting question on suppression of emergent energy technologies. I can side with the rise of interesting storage ideas such as the ultracapacitor in part because of how much the micro-version of the lowly capacitor has steered high-tech the last few years.

In reality, what we now take for granted, capabilities such as persistent data storage, always-on clocks, and power-down state saving, have lead to a revolution in portable electronics. Things such as solid-state mp3 players have now become the rule, whereas a few years ago, users would have thrown their arms up in disgust trying to keep the things running with any reliability and without extreme care and feeding. You see, the advent of low-power consumption static RAM necessary to run these devices would have proved impossible without the reliable dielectrics that went into the solid state designs for memory. And the little bit of non-leaky capacitors that allowed clock circuitry to keep running has saved "dinking-around" time for lots of users. Lots of people would agree that dynamic RAM has done the trick for all of our desktop computing needs, but fewer acknowledge how static RAM (aka flash and non-volatile) has revolutionized the gizmo arena.

And if we can scale capacitance form the micro to the ultra in the same time-frame as the iPod has existed, we might still get some final juice out of the old reliable capacitor.

DOE Report

A new report put out by the U.S. DOE has inspired a fresh perspective or two:

Bloomburg News reported that the Energy Department study found that conventional oil production reached "soft and sudden" peaks in Texas in 1972, North America in 1985, Great Britain in 1999 and Norway in 2001. These dates were predicted by formulas used by proponents of the peak oil theory to predict the crest of global oil production.

I predict the wingnuts will start anti-formula campaigns in the not-too-distant future to help the cornucopians out.

---

Hmmm, just a seasonal adjustment, a loss-prevention measure, or a genuine decline?

Preliminary data from tanker tracker Petrologistics showed Opec pumped 400 000 barrels per day less crude so far in September, compared with the whole of last month, on lower production from the group’s top two producers, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Is the U.S. Military hording and pricing oil?

Kunstler pleads for help in answering a question relating to an oil pricing theory he has:

"Surely there is some enterprising graduate student or trust fund nerd on the peak oil web sites who might investigate this dark notion."

Phew! (wipes brow) That definitely counts me out.

Now watch this drive...


Link courtesy of a Politial Animal commenter. As it happens Kevin Drum thinks Bush's poll numbers have nothing to do with gas price.

Secret Code Exposed

From last week's President's Address to the Nation, comes a reference to the 23rd Psalm. What does this specific fairy tale say?

... Thou anointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over. ...

No wonder his poll numbers have gone up recently.

And then Bush said this:

"We look to the day when the nations of that region recognize their greatest resource is not the oil in the ground, but the talent and creativity of their people."

Translation: Your oil will become mine, all mine.

Blooperstan

George Monbiot lets loose on a most cloying British columnist:

In January this year, for example, the Daily Mail's columnist Melanie Philips asserted that most of the atmosphere "consists of water vapour"(1). She now admits that this was a mistake, but she still maintains that the planet was two degrees warmer 1000 years ago, that there has been no overall rise in global sea levels and that as many glaciers are expanding as shrinking(2) -- all of which are just as wrong.

Now realizing just what kind of hard hitting research backs up her claims, I kind of doubt that we will see a Londonistan any time in the future.

In keeping with tradition, Bush's polling unpopularity tracks very well with the average price of gasoline, which means he has managed a bit of an uptick recently. No luck for Londoner Blair though, as his former trustworthy MP's have left in disgust, draining away political support almost as fast as the North Sea loses its own stockpile of black treasure.

---

I have had mixed feelings with the reshuffling of the Air America Radio lineup. First off, it disappointed me that the creativity, comedy, spark, and ranting of version 1.0 (Winstead, Maron, Seder, Malloy) have essentially gotten replaced with safer and less spontaneous NPR-lite-style programming. However from my own biased energy perspective, the lineup looks fairly solid. AAR has EcoTalk on 5 nights a week, and my local outlet decided to syndicate Thom Hartmann every evening.

Lots of good targets out there ripe for mockery; just from the tiny emirate of Dubai alone, we have ecologic/economic disasters in the making (via comments at TOD):

Prankster's Gallery

Not since Ken Kesey's day has a group of like-minded individuals deserved the moniker of prankster as the cabal of oil depletion analysts (not). Just look at this gallery of production curves, stunningly and meticulously put together at GraphOilogy.

If that bit of heavy lifting ranks as a prank, kick me in the nuts.

Graphoilogist Khebab posted a couple of interesting and potentially relevant volatility charts to TOD a few days ago. In light of the spectactularly huge speculative losses in natural gas hedge funds and ongoing fluctuations in the price of gasoline, this must have a lot of people thinking -- do resource constraints wreak such havoc on the supply/demand curves that all bets go out the window on expecting any kind of stability?

GOM Discovery Model

I have waited for data corresponding to something like the recent deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM) find for a while. This discovery has the right elements of right-wing business hyperventilation and media overkill to make a significant point -- namely that in the greater scheme of things, contributions such as Jack 2 and its siblings remain insignificant for our future global oil production outlook.

Industry analysts estimate that the GOM discovery could add 5 to 15 gigabarrels of oil to our reserve. In terms of the oil shock model, the discovery provides an additional stimulus to that model's world estimate. Putting the two together and using the optimistic value of 15 GB, the new out-year estimate appears below. (Recall that the oil shock model uses a stochastic estimator, so the new curve provides a probability view of expected production and ultimate depletion).

Note the inset which provides a magnification of the two curves around the year 2030.

That basically explains why mental midgets like Larry Kudlow haven't a clue and no one should trust advice emanating from these investment charlatans. In other words, they don't know Jack!