Finally, some good news on the energy front (from a "business as usual" perspective): there appear to have been major technical breakthroughs in the extraction of Unconventional Natural Gas (extracted from three sources: shale, tight gas, and coal. Shale extraction is rising fast, and appears to be capable of offsetting the conventional decline, which has been steep.
The Oil Drum: Can US Natural Gas Production Be Ramped Up?
NPR: Rediscovering Natural Gas By Hitting Rock Bottom.
Do we call off the Doom? Not so fast - but this is offers our overlords the possibility of a fossil-fuel energy lifeline...a real one, as opposed to these overblown 1 billion barrel oilfields. Check out the maps on the oil drum site, and read through the comments. Very interesting stuff there.
Gail (the writer of the Oil Drum article) mentions some factors that may yet inhibit UNG extraction...mostly above ground, economics, infrastructure, etc.
Shale gas operators are up to their eyeballs in debt. They would need to borrow vast sums of money—Berman suggests it would take ~30,000 wells and ~$150 billion—to get shale gas up to 40% of total U.S. dry gas production by 2013.
Shale gas operators can’t possibly make money at current natural gas prices, or medium-term future prices if these are close to the 15-year average (~$5.50/Mcf)...
When we consider disappointing wells and high decline rates in successful wells, it is clear that getting shale gas up to 40% of U.S. production by 2013 is not only very expensive—$7.5-10.5 million for drilling & completion according to Berman—but also requires poking a lot of very expensive holes in the ground...
Will we have a shale gas boom? ... I’m going to say the jury is still out on this one. That’s not a cop-out, because the verdict will be in very soon, certainly within the next few years. Art Berman is making specific predictions, just as Driscoll, Shaefer, and Ziff Energy do. Berman surmises that natural gas prices may stay below or in their average range (~$5.50) for a few years based on a host of new factors that include greater availability of tight gas from the Rockies and increased LNG imports. If Berman is right, we will not see large increases in shale gas production through 2011, or some companies will go belly up, or both.
Promoters like T. Boone Pickens and Aubrey McClendon have offered us a Golden Vision of a future powered by natural gas. Their forecasts assume a shale boom that will last for decades. But we shouldn’t count our chickens before they’re hatched. It costs us very little to take a wait & see attitude on the shale gas boom—we’ll know soon enough if it’s for real.
Another energy source is Solar Thermal (not to be confused with Solar PV). Here are some impressive photographs from a newly opened plant in Andalusia, Spain.
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Before anyone gets carried away (and some have), a sobering article from NewScientist: Earths natural wealth audit:
Take the metal gallium, which along with indium is used to make indium gallium arsenide. This is the semiconducting material at the heart of a new generation of solar cells that promise to be up to twice as efficient as conventional designs. Reserves of both metals are disputed, but in a recent report Ren� Kleijn, a chemist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, concludes that current reserves "would not allow a substantial contribution of these cells" to the future supply of solar electricity. He estimates gallium and indium will probably contribute to less than 1 per cent of all future solar cells - a limitation imposed purely by a lack of raw material.
Here's a link to the images accompanying the article. They're a bit big - too big for most monitors - so I've scaled it down to 1280 pixels wide, here. Note the expiration dates of the minerals - many in the very near future - "at current rates of consumption". Of course, no item will be used at current rates of consumption. A "healthy" economy will double every 25 or 30 years - so these figures might even be optimistic...
In the parched Mexican countryside, the corn is wilting, the wheat stunted. And here in this vast and thirsty capital, officials are rationing water and threatening worse cuts as Mexico endures one of the driest spells in more than half a century.
A months-long drought has affected broad swaths of the country, from the U.S. border to the Yucatan Peninsula, leaving crop fields parched and many reservoirs low. The need for rain is so dire that water officials have been rooting openly for a hurricane or two to provide a good drenching.
Become resouce intelligent, or die:
Since most rainwater pours down storm drains into the sewer network, it is not absorbed into the underground aquifers that are the city's main source of water. Decades of over-pumping is emptying those deposits and causing Mexico City to sink, in some places by more than a foot a year.
The same happens not just in Mexico, but all modern cities. Rainwater is flushed into gutters and sewers, and flushed into rivers and seas instead of refilling aquifers (which is where much of it should go. Los Angeles is a particularly nasty example of this idiocy. Google "LA river" for images of the ultimate in madness. In many parts of the US, rainwater catchment is illegal - utilities regard rainwater as their property, even if it falls on your garden or roof!
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The real problem, of course, is growth. I'd taken it as a given that the best population projections for 2050 were ~9 billion. More recently, those numbers have been moving upwards. Now, we could be looking at close to 11 or 12 billion (almost double the current world population).
Unchecked population growth is speeding climate change, damaging life-nurturing ecosystems and dooming many countries to poverty, experts concluded in a conference report released Monday.
Unless birth rates are lowered sharply through voluntary family-planning programmes and easy access to contraceptives, the tally of humans on Earth could swell to an unsustainable 11 billion by 2050, they warned.
China may overtake the United States as the world's biggest source of greenhouse gases within months, one of the world's leading energy analysts predicted yesterday.
Dr Fatih Birol, chief economist of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, said the country's economic growth had been so fast in 2006 and 2007 that the historic global shift of climate-changing emissions from west to east which was previously predicted for 2009 or 2010 could now happen by November.
The river’s flow ranges from murky white to a bright shade of orange and the waters are so viscous that they barely ripple in the breeze. In Shangba, the river brings death, not sustenance.
“All the fish died, even chickens and ducks that drank from the river died. If you put your leg in the water, you’ll get rashes and a terrible itch,” said He Shuncai, a 34-year-old rice farmer who has lived in Shangba all his life.
“Last year alone, six people in our village died from cancer and they were in their 30s and 40s.”
The EPOXI paper says that water has been "unequivocally" confirmed and that "the entire lunar surface is hydrated during at least some portions of the lunar day".
In another paper, previously unreleased 1999 flyby data from Cassini shows hydroxyl concentrations on "the sunlit face of the Moon". Water was detected in concentrations as high as "10 to 1,000 parts per million" and according to the paper "Regardless of its origin, water is found on the lunar surface in areas previously thought to have been depleted in volatiles."
The Chandrayaan-1 paper says "data suggests that the formation and retention of OH and H2O is an ongoing surficial process. OH/H2O production processes may feed polar cold traps and make the lunar regolith a candidate source of volatiles for human exploration."
Senior regulators say they are seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors. That would enable the fund, which is rapidly running out of money because of a wave of bank failures, to continue to rescue the sickest banks.
Fantastic stuff! Dmitri Orlov, prophet of American collapse, has written a screed about the wingnut teabaggers. They flooded his site to make their usual pinhead comments, resulting in Dmitri disabling comments (until such time as the crawl back under their rocks). A must-read:
Once upon a time I had joined demonstrations, not out of some misplaced idealism, but to pick up women (I was still single at the time). The demonstrations were always full of pretty, high-spirited young women, and the context of marching and chanting slogans together rendered them approachable. And so my first question concerning the crowd marching around the Mall last weekend was, "Where are all the pretty young women?" There weren't any! Surprised, I observed some more. What I saw only deepened my consternation. Not only were there no pretty women to be seen, but the crowd included exactly zero blacks, Latinos or Asians. I don't believe I have ever before seen so many middle-aged, obese, shabbily dressed, melanin-challenged individuals gathered in one place!
What political interests bind over-the-hill flabby white people to the exclusion of all other ethnic groups? What is the shabby white agenda? Perhaps the signs the marchers carried might offer a clue? Most of them carried white corrugated cardboard signs stapled to a sharpened pine stake, of the sort designed for displaying on suburban front lawns. The slogans they scribbled on them were of their own devising, but the form factor of the signs was identical throughout. The slogans related to disparate interests: health care, monetary policy, constitutional law. I eventually stumbled on a pile of the stock they used to make their signs. These were printed signs: the printed side said either "Office Space for Lease!" or "Condos for Sale!". The demonstrators would pry the cardboard off one sign, staple it to another sign face down, and scribble on the blank side of the one in the front. These people are refugees from foreclosure-land that somebody organized and shipped in, together with their props!...
...[Obama] may not be particularly black, but he is definitely not of the same tribe as the Washington demonstrators, who were predominantly of Scots-Irish or English or German descent. This is who America's proud owners and proprietors have been through most of American history, the ethnic groups that have built the American empire, driving slaves, running factories, fighting the natives and driving them into reservations, driving the Mexicans out of the Southwest, and manning the police departments, the military bases and the prisons. They are the ones who worked to impose Pax Americana on the Americas, and, for a short while, almost succeeded in having their way with the rest of the world.
And now they have grown old, fat and sick and are mired in debt. Their time is over, and they are every bit as upset about it as they ought to be. I can't fault them for it. Up until last year, they could comfort themselves by thinking: "We may be poor, but at least we ain't black!" But now they have a black President. What a shock that must be!
A sh!t sandwich: Racism, Stupidity, Stupidity, Racism. Enjoy:
Hmm. The Age of Stupid gets a good review on technophiliac wired.com. Read the comments following the article for a present day demonstration of "age of stupid"...
Im getting so tired of all these apocalyptic movies. I think I’ll fill my lawnmower full of gas and start it and leave it on idle till the tank runs out and repeat.
A bluntly unassuming and rather plain-looking man in his late fifties, Ruppert sits in what looks like a brick bunker and talks about where he thinks the United States is now headed. It is not a pretty picture, but it’s not a naive one, either. Ruppert has more than a perception — he has a welter of facts, a restless and skeptical intelligence, a grasp of history that is professorial in the best sense, and an ability to slice and dice the platitudes of mainstream media. He’s like Noam Chomsky as a gripping pundit of doom. The drama of the movie, and it’s intense, is that even if you want to argue with him (and you will, since he’s predicting very bad things), you can’t dismiss what he’s saying.
The aircraft was flying a combat mission when positive control of the MQ-9 was lost. When the aircraft remained on a course that would depart Afghanistan's airspace, a US Air Force manned aircraft took proactive measures to down the Reaper in a remote area of northern Afghanistan.
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Yet another standout Exile report - this one on Memphis:
The reality is that, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, no one has a monopoly on violence in Memphis. Cops won’t respond to calls in the area because they’re usually setups, where someone is waiting behind a building or on a rooftop to pop a couple of shots at whoever shows up in blue. Not that anyone would want the cops to come anyway. At night, GD’s [a local gang] with AK47’s and baseball bats wrapped in barb wire patrol the streets making sure nobody breaks into anything or nobody tries selling drugs or sex that isn’t supposed to be. You can sure as hell can trust the GD more than the cops. You never know if a cop is going to turn out to be crooked or not.
A while back, there were some B & E’s in the area that the GD’s weren’t behind. A GD who lived across the street from me came over to my house to tell me to keep an eye out for anything strange because “shit been goin’ down we ‘idn’t know ‘bout.” Talk about service.
On the street, you can buy a junk AK-47 for $80, which I’m happy to report is cheaper than the going rate in Mogadishu .
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Option mortgages to explode. The recession is over, the recession is...
Because the new monthly payments can be five or 10 times what borrowers are accustomed to paying, they “threaten a much greater hit to the consumer than the subprimes,” Goddard said, referring to the mortgages often extended to less credit-worthy borrowers that fed the first wave of the financial crisis.
This might surprise you, but I watched the movie "Network" (1976) for the first time last month. Of course, the line "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore" is a cliche that we've all heard - but the scene that really stands out is performed by Ned Beatty:
Globalisation (corporate fascism) was well understood over 30 years ago.
All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?
Mixed feelings about this piece. Much rings true - but the writer seems to be of the opinion that Republicans = fascism, Democrats = democracy. Not so simple, I fear. Both parties are two sides of the same coin. To the Afghan peasant blown to smithereens it matters not if the President is named Obama or Bush. The military industrial complex and the "Iron Triangle" continue to rule, regardless. The emergence of a true National Fascist party in the US would affect the lives of Americans for the worse - and maybe this wouldn't be a bad thing. It would, at last, give Americans a taste of the medicine that they've been handing out for so long.
“There will be blood, in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]. It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out, that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable. The question is whether the general destabilization, the return of, if you like, political risk, ultimately leads to something really big in the realm of geopolitics. That seems a less certain outcome. We've already talked about why China and the United States are in an embrace they don't dare end. If Russia is looking for trouble the way Mr. Putin seems to be, I still have some doubt as to whether it can really make this trouble, because of the weakness of the Russian economy. It's hard to imagine Russia invading Ukraine without weakening its economic plight. They're desperately trying to prevent the ruble from falling off a cliff. They're spending all their reserves to prop it up. It's hardly going to help if they do another Georgia.”
“I was more struck Putin's bluster than his potential to bite, when he spoke at Davos. But he made a really good point, which I keep coming back to. In his speech, he said crises like this will encourage governments to engage in foreign policy aggression. I don't think he was talking about himself, but he might have been. It's true, one of the things historically that we see, and also when we go back to 30s, but also to the depressions 1870s and 19980s, weak regimes will often resort to a more aggressive foreign policy, to try to bolster their position. It's legitimacy that you can gain without economic disparity – playing the nationalist card. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of that in the year ahead.
It's just that I don't see it producing anything comparable with 1914 or 1939. It's kind of hard to envisage a world war. Even when most pessimistic, I struggle to see how that would work, because the U.S., for all its difficulties in the financial world, is so overwhelmingly dominant in the military world.”
As a many conservative activists (Teabaggers, Birthers, Dittoheads, Wannabe Rambos and Members of Congress from South Carolina) rail against government programs and Obama imposed “socialism,” hardly any have yet elected to return government benefits they receive or have already put in the bank.
This form letter may help them in this regard. After all, we are sure they agree that it is the height of hypocrisy to take benefits from institutions that you personally disapprove of, or are in conflict with your values and ideals.
A trojan has been detected which can record Skype calls and send the conversations back to an attacker using an MP3 file.
PC users should avail of the free programs AVG (antivirus), spy-bot (malware and trojan detection), and zonealarm (software firewall). They're not bulletproof, but they'll offer some protection.
The news from Mexico just continues to get worse with bad news from all three of their biggest oil fields...at the beginning of the year Cantarell was producing 862,000 bd and at the end of July this was down to 588,000 bd. The graph plotting decline continues to show a linear decent at the rate of 35,000 bd per month or roughly 100,000 bd every three months – giving it just 17-months at that rate (ending right at the end of next year) until there is nothing left. Somewhere in there the drop is likely to stabilize, but suddenly and soon the questions as to where the replacement hundreds of thousands of barrels are going to come from is going to stop being an almost academic exercise.
How many Americans realise that they get more of their oil imports from Canada, Venezuela and Mexico than from Saudi Arabia? OK, oil is fungible, and the US might be able to replace those imports from somewhere else - but from whom? for how much?
This data also raises the prospect of Mexico becoming a very unstable nation in the near future. All those troops in Afghanistan and Iraq might be needed a lot closer to home if things spiral apart.
Just as well they're all battle hardened and trained for urban combat, eh?
Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, says its tests show the Guara deepwater offshore field holds between 1.1 billion and 2 billion barrels of oil and initial production may start in 2012 with 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day.
I ran the numbers a week ago on the "massive" BP Gulf of Mexico discovery. The world uses 70 million barrels a day (at current levels of consumption. Given that any oilfield will only produce between 30-45% of the total barrels underground, that gives us not an upper limit of 2 billion barrels, but ~900 million. Divide 70 into 900, and we get ~12. 12 days of global oil demand. Woohoo!
Mr. Reid's latest research report – The Big Oil Picture: We're not running out, but that doesn't mean we'll have enough – sees global oil production capacity topping out at 89.6 million barrels per day (bpd) this year, a far more pessimistic view than most other banks or traditional forecasters.
Underinvestment in mature fields, rising resource nationalism, and the cost and difficulty of retrieving oil from discoveries in ultra-deep water could see global production capacity fall to 87.3 million bpd by 2015, according to Mr. Reid.
Mr. Reid, who spent 16 years with oil firms Shell and Amerada Hess, saw the current spare capacity cushion of around 5.2 million barrels wiped out by 2012.
On and on it went. “I’m sick and tired of having people up there comparing us to other countries. If you don’t like it here, go back to Africa!” a stringy woman with a meth-head physique yelled into the mic, goading her own ten-year-old daughter into health care-related illegal immigrant bashing. “How come we who work have to pay for people who don’t pay any taxes?” the girl said, clearly not knowing what the hell she was talking about. Another guy went on a tear about how illegal immigrants are actually flush with cash, but don’t spend it. Instead, they use credit cards that they never bother to pay, forcing us to foot the bill. “Who’s gonna pay for that when they disappear? We are!”
“Yeah, I took an oath to protect and serve my country. Not piddle it away to immigrants and unions,” a vet chimed in.
Jesus Christ. These people really are the perfect slaves. Their brain structure isn’t equipped to handle the complicated ripoff schemes pushed on them by greedy corporations, corrupt politicians or perverted pastors. It was clear that for the majority, racism and violence were about the only concepts they could understand with any certitude.
The best bit? When the Republican hack who was pandering to these idiots fails to match their standards of lunacy - and is threatened with phyiscal violence:
He tried to reassure the crowd that the UN was not going to take over America and that Obama was not going to get full access to their savings accounts, but the people didn’t like that one bit. One guy threatened Lewis straight up, saying that he better not see him support those union lovin’, ACORN-funding Dems. “You better not. Or… I’ll be watching you,” he said, his voice menacingly flat and terse. This wasn’t deadpan liberal comedy. The man meant it, and Jerry Lewis knew it, able to muster only a nervous laugh and attempting to redirect the bad vibes coming his way in the direction of a grotesquely obese heckler in the back, who was drunk and spewing out incomprehensibly slurred grievances for the better part of an hour.
Looks like you've got a tiger by the tail. Good luck with that.
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Is Dan Brown a symptom of collapse? When this drivel tops the best seller lists, one has to wonder. In 450AD was there an ancient Roman named Daniel Brownius, author of turgid scrolls in bad Latin? Or, maybe our DB is merely the non-Christian equivalent to the "Left Behind" novels:
He could taste the familiar tang of museum air - an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon - the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.
As Samuel Beckett put it:
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”.
Europe replaced North America as the world’s richest region last year as measured by assets under management, a survey by the Boston Consulting Group said.
North America, defined as the U.S. and Canada, had $29.3 trillion in assets under management, compared with $32.7 trillion in Europe in 2008, according to the survey released today by the Boston-based firm. The U.S. remains the wealthiest country at $27.1 trillion and has the highest number of millionaires -- almost 4 million. Japan’s global wealth is No. 2 with $13.5 trillion and more than 1 million millionaire households.
Corporate officers and directors have been selling shares at a pace last seen just before the onset of the subprime malaise two years ago.
While a wave of insider selling doesn't necessarily foretell a stock market downturn, it suggests that those with the first read on business trends don't believe current stock prices are justified by economic fundamentals.
"This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago," said co-author Bridget Wade from Texas A&M University.
The study reconstructed CO2 levels around this period, showing a dip around the time ice sheets in Antarctica started to form. CO2 levels were around 750 parts per million, about double current levels.
Read the comments following this (and ANY independent.co.uk article), and a fishy pattern emerges. Snarky put downs - with a consistent tone of moral outrage - from AGW skeptics. Astroturfers, it seems. I wonder why the Independent gives these shills their bandwidth.
NASA has made a series of critical strides toward the development of new nuclear reactors the size of a trash can that could power a human outpost on the moon or Mars.
Three recent tests at different NASA centers and a national lab have successfully demonstrated key technologies required for compact fission-based nuclear power plants for human settlements on other worlds.
...in each of the last three years, the Chinese government has cut the export quotas for rare earth elements from China’s mines. More important is the fact that the Chinese are not preventing the export of products containing rare earth elements; they are simply moving to ban the export of the raw materials. In effect, what the Chinese are saying is that they are no longer willing to accept the Third World’s designated role as a source of raw materials and cheap labor to be exploited for the benefit of somebody else; if the future is going to run on technologies based on rare earth elements, those technologies are going to come out of Chinese factories, and the wealth produced by them is going to be concentrated in Chinese hands.
The world faces “mass starvation” following North America’s next major crop failure. And it could even happen before year’s end. So says Chicago-based Don Coxe, who is one of the world’s leading experts on agricultural commodities, so much so that Canada’s renowned BMO Financial Group named the fund after him.
Climate change will cause shorter crop growing seasons and the world’s under-developed farming sector is ill-prepared to make up for the shortfall, Coxe says. He has been following the farming industry for many years and benefits from more than 35 years of institutional investment experience in Canada and the U.S. This includes managing the best-performing mutual fund in the U.S., Harris Investment Management, as recently as 2005.
In particular, an imminent crop failure in North America will have particularly dire consequences for major overseas markets that are highly reliant on U.S. crop imports, Coxe cautions. Sadly, this scenario could have been avoided had successive North America’s governments not weakened the farming industry with too much political interference, he suggests.
Changes to the Earth's orbit drove centuries of cooling, but temperatures rose fast in the last 100 years as human greenhouse gas emissions rose.
Scientists took evidence from ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments.
Writing in the journal Science, they say this confirms that the Arctic is very sensitive both to changes in solar heating and to greenhouse warming.
The 23 sites sampled were good enough to provide a decade-by-decade picture of temperatures across the region.
The result is a "hockey stick"-like curve in which the last decade - 1998-2008 - stands out as the warmest in the entire series.
People in the Clinton administration had talked about peak oil, including President Clinton and Vice President Gore, and the same thing is true in the Bush administration, and the same is true, to the best of my knowledge, in the Obama administration.
The peak oil story is definitely a bad news story. There’s just no way to sugar-coat it, other than maybe to do what I’ve done on occasion and that is to say that by 2050 we’ll have it right and we will have come through the peak oil recession—quite probably a very deep recession. At some point we’ll come out of this because we’re human beings, and we just don’t give up. And I have faith in people ultimately. But it’s a bad news story and anybody’s who’s going to stand up and talk about the bad news story and is in a position of responsibility in the government needs to then follow immediately and say “here’s what we’re going to do about it,” and no one seems prepared to do that.
Peak oil is a bigger issue than health care, than federal budget deficits, and so forth. We’re talking about something that, to take a middle of the road position—not the Armageddon extreme and not the la-la optimism of some people—is going to be extremely damaging to the U.S. and world economies for a very long period of time. There are no quick fixes.
...alarming data from the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy shows that the flow of global crude oil peaked in 2005 and is now sliding steadily. The world will never "run out of oil," but its flow is in decline. There may still be ample oil reserves left in the ground when oil flows fall to half of today's use. But these remaining reserves are all either very low-quality heavy oil, which is difficult to process, or tainted with toxic elements that make it hard to refine into usable petroleum products.
It would be comforting if some vast new oil frontier existed that would recreate the 20th century's oil miracle, but almost five decades have now elapsed since the last great super-giant oil fields were discovered and the last frontier basins were found.
These two factors -- limited supply and climbing demand -- will work together to push the price of oil higher. In his book, Rubin argues that oil price peaks have caused four of the last five global recessions.
"The over 500% explosion in oil prices from 2002 to the summer of 2008 is almost double the increase that occurred during either OPEC oil shock... No wonder the US economy and the rest of the OECD are in recession."
While he states that high oil prices do cause the demise of demand, he sees the subsequent recession as a temporary setback for oil's race to higher prices. In fact, Rubin predicts that the price of oil will surpass the $100 mark and head to $200 per barrel within the next few years.
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Oil Drum: How (un)reliable are the Red Book Uranium Resource Data? Very technical; lots of numbers. You might want to skip over to the summary. Regarding the conventional belief that we have centuries of uranium, we can reply "Opinions differ".
The conventional world-wide uranium resources are estimated by the authors of the Red Book as 5.5 million tons. Out of these, 3.3 million tons are assigned to the reasonably assured category, and 2.2 million tons are associated with the not yet discovered but assumed to exist inferred resources. Our analysis shows that neither the 3.3 million tons of "assured" resources nor the 2.2 million tons of inferred resources are justified by the Red Book data and that the actual known exploitable resources are probably much smaller.
In a radical report, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has said the system of currencies and capital rules which binds the world economy is not working properly, and was largely responsible for the financial and economic crises.
It added that the present system, under which the dollar acts as the world's reserve currency , should be subject to a wholesale reconsideration.
I've been very busy, working on my short film (25 minutes of doomerish animation). Here's a teaser, which deals with the Growth Problem:
The above is the second half of Sequence 3 (Growth). I've almost finished the 4th sequence, which deals with Food.
Sequence 1 was ~6 minutes, and took ~6 months.
Sequence 2 was ~7 minutes, and took ~6 weeks.
Sequence 3 was ~3 minutes, and took ~5 weeks.
Sequence 4 was ~3 minutes, and took ~10 days!
The final sequence will be about 5 or 6 minutes long. It's hard to estimate how long that will take, as it may have more ground to cover - though I should be able to re-use some existing work from 1-4. Hopefully I'll be done with the animation sometime in November - leaving me free to worry about post-production, music, foley sounds, final narration, etc. There'll also be some extra scenes needed here and there - about 7, dealing with Jevon's paradox, the Rule of 70, Methane Clathrates and other assorted Arcana.
I've already shown sequences 1-3 to a well known Malthusian Physics Professor, who has given them his imprimatur! Looking good!
Dear Mainstream Media,
I know that you are a bit - what's a kind way to say this - thick. Thick as a fucking plank, in fact. Therefore, when you print a headline such as "BP finds mega-huge oilfield we is saved them is lots of oil and billions and shit", one is inclined to healthy skepticism.
It's not like we expect you to know mad mathematics like long division, or even basic research - but you could ask someone who does.
BP Makes "Giant" Oil Find in Gulf of Mexico
"Assuming reserves in place of 4 billion barrels and a 35 percent recovery rate, BP's proven reserves .. would rise by 868 million barrels -- equivalent to 4.8 percent of the group's 18.14 billion barrels of proven reserves," Aymeric De-Villaret, oil analyst at Societe Generale said in a research note.
So - bear in mind that when an oilfield is found to have 100 barrels, only ~40 will be extractable at a profit. That's been the way for decades, and is unlikely to change. URR (Ultimately Recoverable Reserves) is about 40% - and that's using CO2 injection and a lot of finicky tech. When a company finds 1 billion barrels, then they're likely to only be able to extract 400 million of them.
NOW, how many barrels does the world use a day? Well, let's take a bus to the libr... oh wait, it only takes us 5 seconds to find this out on google:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption
85,085,664
Now, here's the hard part, Divide 85,000,000 into 1,000,000,000 (assuming they can extract 100%, which they can't):
11.7 days. Let's be generous, and round it up. 12 days. TWELVE DAYS. Or 48 days of US consumption, if we're feeling selfish. (OF course, this is at current rates of consumption. As the field won't come online for another 6 or 7 years, consumption then might be even higher, if the Second Great Depression hasn't finished us off first).
Journos: IDIOTS. TOOLS. MAROONS! You people are a DISGRACE!
Of course, it all makes good sense if you own stock in BP. Talk up that find, boyos! Your corporate overlords have to put all their grandkids through Ivy League schools - that doesn't come cheap!
To sum up - we don't need to find a Billion barrels - we need to find a TRILLION barrels: five or six new Saudi Arabias. Names like Ghawar, Cantarell, Burgan, DaQing (note to hacks: they're oilfields, in KSA, Mexico, China and Kuwait. Really big ones - and they're all peaked or about to). Preferably, to find them 7 years ago, so that they'd be coming online today. How's that working out for ya?
