^ Truckers will really fight an increase in the Ohio gas/diesel tax. They have quite the powerful lobby.

Branson Says Oil Might Hit $200 a Barrel Without New Policies

 

By Kim Chipman - Dec 5, 2010

 

Oil prices may soar to $200 a barrel if the world doesn’t move more rapidly to a clean-energy economy, Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd., said in an interview.

 

“It’s certainly conceivable unless we can start to conserve energy quickly and come up with alternative fuels,” Branson said yesterday in Cancun, Mexico, where countries are meeting to negotiate a new accord to combat climate change.

 

Branson predicts an “unbelievably painful” economic slump if governments don’t do more to encourage renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuels such as oil. In the U.S., where efforts to cap carbon-dioxide emissions failed in the Senate earlier this year, unemployment could reach record highs, the British billionaire said.

 

Full story at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-05/branson-says-oil-may-hit-200-a-barrel-without-new-clean-energy-policies.html

 

While looking for articles about oil passing the $90 mark, I found this.....

 

Oil will run out 90 years before alternatives are widely available, UC Davis study says

November 9, 2010 |  3:09 pm

 

The global oil supply is set to run dry 90 years before replacements such as renewable energy are ready to satisfy the same amount of demand, according to UC Davis researchers.

 

Current policies that set targets for batteries, hydrogen, biofuel and other alternative energy sources  won’t be enough, a study published Monday says.

 

Deb Niemeier, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and postdoctoral researcher Nataliya Malyshkina examined existing public companies dealing in non-oil fuels such as BlueFire Ethanol Inc. of Irvine and Enova Systems Inc. of Torrance.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/11/oil-will-run-out-90-years-before-alternatives-become-widely-available-study.html

I don't know Enova Systems, but I'm a little skeptical of a study that looks to current business trends to predict the emergence or absence of game-changing technologies, especially since one of the specifically named studied companies appears to be an ethanol manufacturer, where smart money has already left (save those that are really investing in routing federal subsidies into their pockets through ethanol companies, not profits from successful products).  The article was pretty short and didn't say much about the methodology used.

Dec. 23, 2010, 9:21 a.m. EST

Oil at two-year high on demand expectations

By Kate Gibson, MarketWatch

 

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Oil prices on Thursday remained near $91 a barrel as the commodity tracked the equities market, while supply data indicated a likely pickup in demand.

 

...Oil was also drawing support from declining U.S. supplies, signaling demand might be on the rise.

 

The Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration on Wednesday said supplies fell by 5.3 million barrels last week from the prior week. The decline comes after the EIA said last week that supplies fell 9.9 million barrels, the largest drop in eight years.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/crude-oil-remains-near-91-a-barrel-2010-12-23?reflink=MW_news_stmp

I included the whole list but left out the detail for each item....

 

Published Dec 21 2010 by Transition Voice, Archived Dec 22 2010

Top 10 peak oil stories of 2010

by Erik Curren

 

 

The biggest stories of the year were financial. But you could say that the continuing Great Recession, the deficit debate, and more and more mortgage defaults were really stories of energy-driven economic crisis.

 

This year also had plenty of big stories directly on energy, including some breakthroughs on peak oil. Here are our top picks. It's a highly subjective list; so please chime in with any stories you think we left off.

 

1.Gulf Oil Apocalypse.

 

2.IEA Declares Peak Oil in 2006.

 

3.Military Declares War on Peak Oil.

 

4.California Beats Back Attack from Big Oil.

 

5.Unconventional Fossil Fuels Ready for Their Close-up, Mr. De Mille.

 

6.Totnes Releases Energy Descent Plan.

 

7.Transition Voice Launches.

 

8.Kunstler Kourts Kontroversy.

 

9.Oil Squirts Towards $100 per Barrel.

 

10.Super Rich Old Guys Invest in Peak Energy for Good and Ill.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-12-22/top-10-peak-oil-stories-2010

Kunstler Kourts Kontroversy? That's a terrible line, especially considering James' lineage.

Year of the charts.....

 

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7282

This is a redirect from this discussion at the 3C thread....

http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,18328.msg535043.html#msg535043

 

I wrote this article in late 2008. The people I quoted in this article were right...

 

Falling oil prices lull America back to sleep

Low prices should buy U.S. time to prepare for oil shortages

By Ken Prendergast

 

In the past five years, prescient energy scientists and other analysts have postulated that as the world gets closer to peak oil production, there will be wild swings in oil prices. As a result of this volatility, global economic conditions will also experience a wild rollercoaster ride.

 

Scientists like Kenneth Deffeyes, professor emeritus at Princeton University, have called this the Queuing Theory of oil prices. And, unlike rollercoasters, the Queuing Theory isn’t fun. In fact, it’s incredibly dangerous for the world’s most oil-dependent economies. And none is more gluttonous when it comes to oil than the United States.

 

In 2009, new President Barack Obama can quickly address this by going back to his original plan of a “green economic stimulus” which promotes alternative energy, walkable neighborhoods, public transportation and, of course, high-speed rail. Instead, when oil prices fell, billions of dollars in new-capacity highway expansion proposals found their way into the federal stimulus package – projects that will only spur more sprawl, worsen our dependence on oil and release more carbon into the atmosphere.

 

“[The] Queuing Theory predicts that queues behave in a noisy and chaotic manner when demands approach the system capacity,” Deffeyes wrote in 2008. “Instead of energy prices rising to a new stable level, wild price oscillations will result from short-term changes in demand. There will be a tendency, the first time that prices go down, to announce that the crisis is over and oil and gas are now cheap and abundant again.”

 

Such apathy emerged as oil prices collapsed from $147 per barrel in July 2008 to below $40 in December. Prior to the drop in price, Americans were reducing their driving at a rate not seen since the gasoline rationing of World War II. Meanwhile ridership on the nation’s buses and trains were at their highest levels since before construction began on the Interstate Highway System more than 50 years ago. But in the last few months of 2008, sales of gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles rose for the first time in several years.

 

“A false sense of smug security could set in if prices drop and stay there, and some oil-exporting nations have already announced a slacking off of investments in the oil industry, if prices continue to be depressed. So eventually when the oil demand would pick up, we would have even less oil than now,” wrote James Leigh in the Oct. 3, 2008 edition of the Energy Bulletin. Leigh is an assistant professor of cultural geography at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus.

 

According the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), high oil prices and the economic downturn caused worldwide oil consumption to decline by 50,000 barrels per day. A worsening economy in 2009 could cause global oil consumption to fall by 450,000 barrels per day and keep oil prices down. It would be the first time in three decades of two consecutive years of falling oil demand.

 

“Volatility is in some ways an even worse problem than high prices, because sustained high oil prices make long-term investments in alternative energy sources and public transportation look sensible – whereas periodically collapsing oil prices discourage such investments,” wrote Richard Heinberg on July 30, 2008 for the Post Carbon Institute. Heinberg has authored eight books on oil depletion and its effects on the global economy.

 

Oil companies are being hit with a double-whammy – collapsing oil prices and the global credit crunch. Companies which mine the Canadian oil sands, which supply America with more than 5 percent of its daily oil supply, need oil prices of at least $50 per barrel to break even. The reason is the costs of mining and processing oil sands are so high. The same holds true for tapping deepwater oil reserves. Most of the easy-to-get, low-cost oil in the world has already been found. Oil companies won’t tap the remaining oil unless they can secure financing for these multi-billion-dollar oil recovery projects.

 

Oil field financing and development is as critical as promoting conservation and alternative fuels to delay peak oil for as long as possible. Peak oil is the point at which an oil field, a region, nation or the entire planet reaches a maximum level of oil production and falls no matter how much additional investment is made to yield more oil. That point can only be determined in hindsight. In the United States, peak oil was reached nearly 40 years ago.

 

In November 2008, the International Energy Agency (IEA) produced a very important report that was barely noticed by the media and the public as oil prices fell. Called the World Energy Outlook, the IEA’s report made some startling statements, especially for an historically conservative watchdog group for the planet’s largest energy-consuming nations.

 

The report showed that oil production from the world’s largest oil fields may decline by as much 9 percent a year in the next two decades. To offset these depletion rates, the world will need to find 64 million barrels per day of new oil production by 2030. That’s the equivalent of finding the production of four new Saudi Arabias. The chance of that is virtually zero, as worldwide oil discoveries dwindled from a peak in the 1960s to a trickle today despite zealous exploration efforts. In the absence of new discoveries and investment in costly deepwater wells, oil sands and other non-conventional sources, the IEA predicted worldwide oil shortages were possible by 2015.

 

As global peak oil “is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically,” wrote Robert Hirsch in his landmark 2005 report “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management.” Dubbed the Hirsch Report, it was produced at the request of the U.S. Department of Energy. The DOE delayed releasing the unsettling report, which forecast dire global economic consequences from peak oil if the world failed to prepare for it at least 20 years in advance.

 

Few nations need more time to prepare than the United States. The U.S. has just 5 percent of the world’s population but consumes 25 percent of its oil. That’s a holdover from 100 years of America being the globe’s larger producer of oil. That ended in 1970 when America’s oil production peaked.

 

Instead of curbing our oil-fueled lifestyle of automobile over-dependency and wasteful suburban sprawl in unison with falling domestic oil supplies, America intensified its oil appetite. Such gluttony was made possible by importing oil, including from some politically unstable nations. Today, America imports two-thirds of its oil to fuel a lifestyle it can no longer support on its own.

 

Worse, America is bleeding itself economically. The importing of so much oil means that we sent $1.2 trillion of America’s wealth overseas in the past three years, according to data from the EIA. $500 billion of that wealth transference occurred just in 2008.

 

Hirsch predicts that the U.S. will need to invest $20 trillion from a mix of governmental, corporate and personal sources to convert our economy from one dependent on oil to one less dependent on all sources of energy. Yet the remaining energy sources could include electricity from the usual litany of renewables – wind, solar, hydrological. Plus there are problematic but promising energy carriers and sources like hydrogen, nuclear and ethanol.

 

The federal stimulus program is becoming a wasted opportunity. It is littered with new-capacity highway projects – billions of dollars worth in the Midwest alone. Funding new and wider highways for more petroleum-burning cars is less money that can be invested in weaning our nation off petroleum.

 

“It’s a lot of more of the same,” said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the stimulus legislation. He was quoted in a Dec. 29, 2008 Bloomberg article. “You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize” urban and suburban communities and “pull resources away from transit.”

 

“We should not cling to crude down to the last drop,” wrote Faith Birol, IEA chief economist in an opinion piece in the March 2, 2008 edition of The Independent. “We should leave oil before it leaves us. That means new approaches must be found soon.”

 

“So our future affair with oil may be within an overall trend of declining supply and rising demand, with volatility of prices from the anxiety of the market in which demand surges higher over supply,” Leigh said. “But the prices will be intermittently buffeted up and down by the fluctuations of economic growth and its levels of fluctuating demand for oil. As investors vie for advantage, they too will aggravate the gyrating price trends.”

 

The most effective alternative fuel is the one that isn’t consumed. That means conservation. Unfortunately, too many assume that conservation means less economic development and fewer jobs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, the money saved from driving and spending for foreign oil can be used domestically for buying locally grown foods, starting a small business, making your home more energy efficient, or saving up to buy your own home for the first time instead of renting it. Indeed, many Americans are locked into lower standards of living because they must own a car (a depreciable asset) to reach a job and rent housing (an appreciable asset) instead of owning. That prevents many working-class and low-income Americans from building equity and wealth.

 

The actual use of trains and transit is more energy efficient than driving, according to recent U.S. Department of Transportation data (using very conservative, if not inaccurate data that assumes an average of just 20 riders per Amtrak train). But even more efficient are the types of supportive land use which trains and transit need to generate more ridership – walkable, densely developed, mixed-use neighborhoods built around transit stops and train stations. By comparison, much of the nation’s suburban sprawl is built around state highways and federal interstates. Most of the trips (nearly all by car) in those communities don’t involve the highway. They are on city streets to the store, school, coffee shop, bank, post office, etc. But those communities might never have been built if not for the highway.

 

The same is true for high-density, walkable communities spurred by intercity passenger rail. In walkable communities built tightly around trains and transit, those trips are no longer made by car. Instead, they are made on foot from an upper-floor townhouse to a first-floor bank or drugstore, or to the restaurant across the street, or on a bicycle or bus to the park a mile away on the other side of the neighborhood.

 

“What everyone needs to remember is this: the fundamental cause of the recent oil price spike has not gone away,” Heinberg said, referring to a lack of growth in global oil production. “The current brief respite from the hammering effect of new oil price records being set almost daily is not an occasion to go back to sleep, but an opportunity to consolidate efforts toward energy conservation and transition.”

 

END

Every year from 2007 to 2010, the US Energy Information Administration has predicted that *this year* is the year oil production is really going to take off! And every year they turn out to be wrong and revise their predictions downward ... but next year for sure! It's Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football:

 

 

And what good is oil production if the world's biggest oil exporters are keeping more oil for their own uses (including storage for future domestic needs)....

 

Published Jan 12 2011 by Falls Church News-Press, Archived Jan 12 2011

The peak oil crisis: civil unrest

by Tom Whipple

 

America's problem today is that almost nobody in any official position is willing to publicly recognize the real nature of the problem we face and start talking about realistic solutions. So long as our elected officials and our media continue to speak endlessly about the recovery that is supposedly underway and continue to hold out the hope that, by voting for this or that candidate, all will be well, the great charade will continue and the people will get madder and madder.

 

The lack of realism on the part of those in a position to lead public opinion, and the endless repletion of fictions, such as the U.S. unemployment rate now being only 9.4 percent, has left open the door to what were once thought of as extremists to join the political debate and even the Congress. Proposals that are tantamount to national, or perhaps even global, suicide such as defaulting on the national debt, rolling back health care, or dropping environmental regulation are seriously debated as solutions to creating more jobs.

 

The real problem, of course, is that without a continually growing source of cheap and abundant energy, such as that provided by fossil fuels, there will never again be significant economic growth in the sense to which we have become accustomed. It is inevitable that we are all going to get much poorer, in a material sense, and this is the great secret of our age that so far few have had the courage to express. The easier path has been Keynesian stimulation of the economy, government bailouts of what were held to be key financial and industrial institutions, and tax cuts to mollify those who believe all problems stem from taxes. These measures were accompanied by endless expressions of hope that things would soon be better.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-01-12/peak-oil-crisis-civil-unrest

The above article epitomizes one of the (many) phenomena that has always irked me about many in the doom-and-gloom camp: Their advocacy pieces don't actually advocate anything.  "America's problem today is that almost nobody in any official position is willing to publicly recognize the real nature of the problem we face and start talking about realistic solutions."  In that entire column, nothing was presented that vaguely looked like a solution.  Indeed, the lack of any concrete proposal for positive movement forward combined with the "inevitable" decline ("It is inevitable that we are all going to get much poorer, in a material sense, and this is the great secret of our age that so far few have had the courage to express") hints but avoids going so far as to expressly say that the author's view is that we should all just resign ourselves to increasing material poverty and all its associated ills (shorter lifespans, greater domestic unrest, etc.).  That is not a "solution" in many people's books.  If the author has any other "solutions" in mind, he is conspicuously reticent to put them forth for evaluation.

The author is a retired CIA analyst. I interviewed him after he gave a presentation to the National League of Cities' energy/environment committee meeting in Cleveland. By training and lifelong work experience, he tells others of data he's collected, his recognition of emerging trends and the potential policy implications of recent events. He rarely makes recommendations.

Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, we're going down....

Lies, Damn Lies, and the Bakken promise

 

There's an e-mail that's still making the rounds out there about the Bakken Formation and how the environmentalists are the ones preventing America from enjoying the good ol' days of cheap petroleum. Send this message back to those who forward the e-mail to you....

_________

 

There's an old saying: "A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top." The same is true for the Bakken Formation. It will make many people rich -- especially landowners. It might even keep oil/gas prices down in the Dakotas and Montana where the Bakken Formation is located. But it probably will not have a noticeable effect on global or even domestic oil supplies and costs. Why?

 

1. Bakken Shale is not conventional liquid oil. It is a semi-solid that is recovered slowly by mining or hydro-fracturing through horizontal wells and refined via a complicated, costly process.

 

2. Because Bakken Shale does not "flow", and despite the large physical quantities involved (much of which is unrecoverable), the productivity of the Bakken Formation is comparatively low -- as much as 150,000 to 200,000 barrels of oil per day is likely to be the peak output, according to the US Geological Survey.

 

3. That sounds like a lot of oil, and for many smaller, undeveloped nations it would be. But the United States consumes 20 million barrels of oil PER DAY. It has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its oil consumption.

 

4. The entire recoverable amount of fuel in the Bakkan Formation would last the U.S. just six months. Spread over the 20- to 40-year life of an oil field, the Bakken contribution to domestic supplies is insignificant.

 

5. Furthermore, U.S. domestic production has been on a steady decline since its production peak of 10 million barrels of oil per day in 1970 to just 5.5 million today as older fields are depleted. Bakken does little more than slow domestic depletion rates. It doesn't reverse them.

 

6. Fracturing the Bakken Shale requires incredible amounts of water which is not in great abundance in the Dakotas and Montana. After the water is pumped out, it must be cleaned because oil shale is very toxic. Sadly, toxic water is already getting into farmers' wells and natural aquifers with legal action pending in some cases.

 

7. Some of the deeper, more difficult to reach Bakken Shale cannot be economically recovered and refined until oil prices rise further. So it may someday slow the rise of the prices, but at an elevated rate that is higher than today's.

 

Sorry. Here's another saying: "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

 

To read much more detail on Bakken, check out:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3868

Published Jan 19 2011 by Falls Church News-Press

The peak oil crisis: it’s not adding up!

by Tom Whipple

 

Leaving aside the issue of whether the annual increase in global demand will actually fall by 50 percent in 2011 vs. 2010, we have the current global supply numbers which the IEA says fell slightly in December to 88.1 million b/d. Keep in mind that only about 74 million b/d of this production is real crude oil coming out of a pipe in the ground. The rest is a mixture of lighter hydrocarbons extracted from natural gas, ethanol from plants, and tar sands. These either have much lower energy than real crude, or consume prodigious amounts of energy in their production which amounts to the same thing. Thus, the last 14 million or so of our 88 million b/d is producing much less useful work than if it were real crude oil, and likely is slowly contributing to the increasing demand.

 

....Unless these questions are answered in the affirmative, the prospects for a price-spike free year do not look good. The IEA says that China's oil consumption climbed to pass the symbolic 10 million b/d level to 10.2 million b/d in November as Beijing shut down power plants to reach year-end efficiency goals. While everyone seems to be predicting some sort of drop in the torrid pace at which China's demand for oil has been increasing, the question is whether it be as much as the IEA and EIA are forecasting. The Agency's director recently said that OPEC must continue to be alarmed that the recent ascent to near $100 oil is more than just a cold winter as speculators. We all should be alarmed too.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-01-19/peak-oil-crisis-it%E2%80%99s-not-adding

 

ublished Jan 21 2011 by Transition Voice, Archived Jan 21 2011

If Britain starts fuel rationing, could US be next?

by Erik Curren

 

This week, a group of the British parliament released a plan to start rationing fuel within the next ten years. Could the US follow suit?

 

The plan calls for the government to issue an equal number of Tradable Energy Quotas to all British adults for free and to auction credits off to businesses and government agencies. The goal of TEQs would be to encourage conservation and to deal with any future energy shortages in a way that's more fair than letting high prices determine who buys energy and who doesn't.

 

...On this side of the pond, where down-home ignorance has become a sign of authenticity, where Sarah Palin shapes the English language and where Tea Partiers proudly wield misspelled signs with nonsensical messages like "Government: Hands Off My Medicare," unfortunately what we can expect to see on energy is just more no-nothing sloganeering along the lines of "drill baby drill" and more efforts by the GOP-led House to cut spending on clean energy and efficiency while leaving fossil fuel subsidies alone.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-01-21/if-britain-starts-fuel-rationing-could-us-be-next

OK, one more from today. This is a decent summary article of recent events and news. A good article to send to others to introduce them to the problem....

 

The Peak Oil Catastrophe-in-waiting

By Tam Hunt, Contributor  |  January 24, 2011

 

....Prices steadily recovered since their low in early 2009 and are back to dangerous levels in early 2011 (about $90 a barrel). We can expect far higher prices as the global recovery continues. An increasing number of analysts are projecting prices as high or higher than the 2008 peak in the next couple of years.

 

More importantly, global net exports of oil continue to drop as major oil exporters increase their own consumption at the same time as their production is stagnant or falling. As a major oil-importing nation (about 2/3 of our oil is imported, by far the largest import dependency in the world), net oil exports are far more important to the U.S. than total oil production. Even if global oil production increases in the coming years, if there is less available for oil-thirsty nations like ours the situation will be far worse than total oil production figures would otherwise suggest. More on this below.

 

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/01/the-peak-oil-catastrophe-in-waiting

Cross-posted from the tea party thread (best to discuss the resource implications here, the politics at the other thread).....

 

 

RESOURCE INSIGHTS

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 06, 2011

Is the modern anti-tax movement a product of increasing complexity?

 

The anti-tax movement in the United States has evolved from a fringe component of American politics 40 years ago into one that is central today. And certainly, the country has had a long history of tax protests, right? Actually, wrong.

 

While the Boston Tea Party is often cited as the inspiration for today's so-called Tea Party, the Boston Tea Party was an outgrowth of a movement to end "taxation without representation." The American colonists didn't object to taxes per se; they objected to taxes levied by a body--in this case the British Parliament--in which they had no representatives. That's hardly the situation with the modern Tea Party. The members of the modern movement may not like their elected representatives, but they do have them.

 

The Whiskey Rebellion is the only significant tax revolt in American history prior to California's Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative which limited property taxes.

 

...And so, the historical animus that Americans supposedly have toward taxes has been largely manufactured to facilitate the propaganda machine of the modern anti-tax movement. This means that the long hiatus between the Whiskey Rebellion and Proposition 13 must be considered the norm in American history and that some recent change in American circumstances must be responsible for the modern anti-tax movement.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2011/02/is-modern-anti-tax-movement-product-of.html

Do you actually believe this hypothesis, or are you just throwing it out there?  I'm not going to bother attacking it (in either thread) if no one is actually defending it.

Attack away.

The fundamental point that America has slowed in its ability to adapt seems pretty obvious. And I agree that cutting taxes is not the cure for the problem. We can't keep growing the way we have been -- those returns are diminishing. However, devolving to "simpler times" is not a solution. We need to find different paths of "complexity" to follow. Some of that should involve back-tracking to simpler methodologies, then branching off in a different way. Progress doesn't have to be stifling, but it must be progress in a direction which yields returns.

 

I wonder if that isn't what the author is trying to say. Because the logical conclusion of his thesis seems to be Luddite in nature, though he actively avoids appearing that way. To reconcile his view with the acceptance that going backwards is not the best way to go forwards (which I think he implicitly pushes), he needs to accept that there is a possible path of increased complexity which continues yielding returns. It's just not the one we're on, and cutting taxes won't magically put us on, or get us closer to, the right one.

In the era when Californians were decreasing local taxes, Ohio Governor Rhodes was encouraging local governments to create more taxing schemes.  Municipal income taxes are not common in America.

...RESOURCE INSIGHTS

...Is the modern anti-tax movement a product of increasing complexity?

...

The Whiskey Rebellion is the only significant tax revolt in American history prior to California's Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative which limited property taxes.

 

...And so, the historical animus that Americans supposedly have toward taxes has been largely manufactured to facilitate the propaganda machine of the modern anti-tax movement. This means that the long hiatus between the Whiskey Rebellion and Proposition 13 must be considered the norm in American history and that some recent change in American circumstances must be responsible for the modern anti-tax movement.

...

WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices

US diplomat convinced by Saudi expert that reserves of world's biggest oil exporter have been overstated by nearly 40%

John Vidal, environment editor

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 February 2011 22.00 GMT

 

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

 

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.

 

The revelation comes as the oil price has soared in recent weeks to more than $100 a barrel on global demand and tensions in the Middle East. Many analysts expect that the Saudis and their Opec cartel partners would pump more oil if rising prices threatened to choke off demand.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks

Commentary on the above......

 

Digging out the truth about Saudi oil

Posted By Steve LeVine  Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 12:16 PM

 

A senior Saudi Arabian oil official said in 2007 that the kingdom has 388 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves, about 45 percent more than official public estimates. But about the same time, a retired Saudi Aramco executive met with U.S. diplomats in Dhahran and asserted that the country's figures in general are wildly overblown, and that it is headed for a production peak around 2020, followed by a slow decline according to new WikiLeaks cables.

 

The issue is pivotal. Put simply, the price of oil -- the price you are paying at the pump, indeed the cost of everything in your home -- is wholly determined by what oil traders think Saudi reserves and production capability really are. As an example, oil plunged yesterday to its lowest price of the year -- $87.87 a barrel -- when Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi (pictured above) suggested that the kingdom will put new oil supplies on the market to compensate for any uptick in global demand.

 

The thing is, the Saudis are highly secretive about these figures -- unlike almost every important petrostate on Earth outside the Middle East, the Saudis will not permit their oil fields to be independently audited. One might wonder why that would be the case, and the late Matt Simmons, for example, made much hay suggesting that the reason is that the Saudis simply don't have as much oil as they claim. I myself got ahold of documents back in 2008 suggesting the same. Sensible voices, however, said such are the thoughts of the conspiratorial-minded and that the Saudis genuinely possess what they claimed -- they were denying the right to verify because … well because that's just what they do. Here is classic Simmons:

 

READ MORE AT:

http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/09/digging_out_the_truth_about_saudi_oil

Since actions speak louder than words, THIS is a more telling article than the ones about the Saudis lying about their oil reserve data. According some people's view of the world, Saudi Arabia can just drill/pump more oil to increase its net exports, but don't because they'd rather just withhold oil from the west, right? WRONG. And what similar energy efficiency steps is America undertaking......?

 

Saudi Arabia to save energy through insulation

 

EDDAH | Sat Feb 12, 2011 6:49pm IST

(Reuters) - Top oil exporter Saudi Arabia plans to cut up to 40 percent of its energy use, largely by enforcing investment in insulation, its water and power minister said on Saturday.

 

Power demand in the top OPEC producer is rising at an annual rate of 8 percent, requiring investments of close to $80 billion by 2018.

 

Without reducing the rate of energy consumption growth, the kingdom could see oil available for export drop some 3 million barrels per day (bpd) to less than 7 million bpd in 2028, Khalid al-Falih, the chief executive of state oil firm Saudi Aramco said last year.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/02/12/idINIndia-54850120110212?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&rpc=401

My job involves infrastructure design in various countries out in the middle east.  All of these projects are implementing robust environmental sustainability measures.  I'd like to see such practices implemented at a similar caliber here in the U.S.  Though in some cities like Chicago, they already are being implemented.

Oil shot up today. The most in 3 years.

Oil shot up today. The most in 3 years.

 

Wow, a $7 increase in WTI to almost $97 per barrel! Impressive.

 

But it should be noted that most oil that comes out of the ground throughout the world isn't sweet like West Texas Intermediate. It's sour like Brent, which today was selling for $106.92 per barrel for next month's delivery. And there's many other oil futures you can buy. Some are shown here: http://www.cmegroup.com/market-data/delayed-quotes/energy.html

Expecting this kind of visioning and the video from an oil giant was unthinkable just five years ago.....

 

The coming misery that Big Oil discusses behind closed doors

Posted By Steve LeVine  Monday, February 14, 2011 - 10:41 AM

 

When big-thinkers at companies with the most skin in the energy game are behind closed doors and they discuss how the world really looks going forward, do they say that there are bumps in the road but that things will be fine, just fine, as they suggest publicly? Three years ago, we got a glimpse into the room when Royal Dutch/Shell issued a scenario forecasting the world in 2020. Based on current economic and energy-use patterns around the world, Shell said that energy supplies will be so tight that they will tip the world into a full-blown crisis in which governments will force their populations to reduce driving, use less electricity, and pay an extremely steep increase for what they do consume. There will be a massive, decade-long economic slowdown, and geopolitical power will shift dramatically to energy-producing nations, the company said.

 

Today, Shell returned with an update. The company said that the 2008 financial crisis interrupted the slide it predicted, but that the clock has begun ticking again. If the world does not change how it uses energy, its scenario will hold true.

 

In recent weeks, we've heard almost identical energy-consumption projections from ExxonMobil (here is Exxon's neat slide show), BP and now Shell: The world will use about 40 percent more energy by 2030. The difference is that Exxon and BP more or less just toss out the numbers, while Shell suggests that one might consider running for the hills, oh, sometime around 2016 or 2017 before everyone else shows up. You all can plan to return home around 2030, Shell has said, when the world has come to its senses and adopted all the efficiency and price-signal mechanisms that some forward-thinkers are suggesting now.

 

READ MORE AND SEE THE VIDEO AT:

http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/14/the_coming_misery_that_big_oil_discusses_behind_closed_doors

 

Screw it, here's the video....

That this is Shell doing this forecast should send warning bells to anyone familiar with Shell and its involvement with scenario forecasting or scenario planning.

 

Royal Dutch/Shell had long relied on forecasting to guide strategic decisions. But by the early 1970s, Shell had come to realize that traditional forecasting created a narrow, blinkered view of the future and invested in scenario planning. As a result, Shell did not make a prediction about the future price of oil; instead it systematically developed a set of plausible scenarios about what could happen to oil prices in different contexts. When Shell saw the indicators for one of its scenarios — one that featured a rapid rise in prices — were coming to pass, it changed its strategy accordingly. Other oil companies thought Shell was crazy, and that a rise in prices was impossible. But it wasn't. Shell was the first oil company to profit from the 1973 oil shock because it was the first to see it coming.

 

source

 

...and a bio on the guy, who developed scenario planning at Shell:  Guru: Pierre Wack

 

"Pierre Wack (1922-1997) was an unconventional French oil executive who developed the use of scenario planning (see article) at Royal Dutch Shell’s London headquarters in the 1970s. So successful was he that the Anglo-Dutch oil giant was able to anticipate not just one Arab-induced oil shock during that decade, but two."

 

 

 

If the world had a lot of surplus oil capacity, losing just 1 mbd wouldn't even be noticed.....

 

Published Mar 3 2011 by ASPO-USA, Archived Mar 3 2011

Peak oil notes - March 3

by Tom Whipple

 

Developments this week

 

The fighting in Libya continues to push oil prices higher with NY crude futures settling on Wednesday at $102.23, the first settlement above $100 since summer 2008. In London, Brent crude settled at $116.35 a barrel after touching $117.80. The situation in Libya appears to be moving towards a prolonged civil war, with the West unwilling to intervene militarily and neither the forces still loyal to Gadhafi nor the rebels having the strength to overcome the other. The IEA says as much as 1 million b/d of Libya’s pre-uprising production of 1.6 million b/d is no longer being produced. Although a few tankers apparently are still leaving the country, much of the circa 1.3 million b/d of exports is no longer being shipped.

 

The Saudis announced that they have offered two European refiners additional cargoes of Arab Light crude for loading in March. Given that European refiners are facing shortfalls on the order of 30 million barrels or more per month due to the shut-in Libyan production, it is difficult to see the Saudis coming up with this much oil and getting it to European refiners on short notice. Most knowledgeable observers are skeptical that the Saudis can make up for the loss of the high-quality Libyan oil.

 

The weekly US stocks report showed a drop in US crude inventories of 364,000 barrels as opposed to a 750,000 barrel gain forecast by analysts. US gasoline inventories fell by 3.6 million barrels contributing to another rise in NY gasoline futures of 4.6 cents a gallon to close at $3.03. Forecasts that average US gasoline prices will be above $4 a gallon by the Fourth of July are now widespread. For now, however, US demand for oil products continues to run 1–2 percent above last year at 19.6 million b/d.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-03-03/peak-oil-notes-march-3

Making Every Oil Calorie Count

 

By AMANDA LITTLE

Nashville

For The New York Times

 

AS turmoil in Libya pushes up the price of oil, American consumers are once again feeling the sting of $3.50-a-gallon gasoline. But the impact of costly crude on our lives and economy extends far beyond the pump. Virtually everything we consume — from hamburgers, running shoes and chemotherapy to Facebook, Lady Gaga MP3s and “60 Minutes” — is produced from or powered by fossil fuels and their byproducts, all of which could grow more costly as the price of petroleum rises.

 

The problem is that there is no easy way to quantify how much total energy we consume. Fortunately, there’s a great model already in widespread use: the nutritional information that appears on the back of every food product. Why not create the same sort of system for energy?

 

Americans use more oil than people in any other developed country, about twice as much per capita, on average, as Britons. Indeed, our appetite for petroleum, like our fondness of fast foods, has spawned a kind of obesity epidemic, but one without conspicuous symptoms like high blood pressure and diabetes. And because we don’t see how much energy goes into the products and services we purchase, we’re shielded from knowing the full extent of our personal energy demands — and unprepared when rising fuel prices increase the cost of everything else.

Read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/opinion/09Little.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

I like it!

Ask California to try it out. I'm sure they'd be game!

^^^Yeah because Americans are so good at following diets. :roll:  I suppose it's a start though.

Good point.

I just heard a report  that gas may get upto $7 a gallon by the 4th of July.  The second largest economy in the world(Japan) pays about $6.70 (USD) a gallon now.

I just heard a report  that gas may get upto $7 a gallon by the 4th of July.  The second largest economy in the world(Japan) pays about $6.70 (USD) a gallon now.

 

Source?

 

And gas MAY go up to $10 a gallon too, but that doesn't mean it will. 

I just heard a report  that gas may get upto $7 a gallon by the 4th of July.  The second largest economy in the world(Japan) pays about $6.70 (USD) a gallon now.

 

I think China passed Japan for 2nd largest economy.  But that's neither here nor there. 

I just heard a report  that gas may get upto $7 a gallon by the 4th of July.  The second largest economy in the world(Japan) pays about $6.70 (USD) a gallon now.

 

Source?

 

And gas MAY go up to $10 a gallon too, but that doesn't mean it will. 

 

I don't have a link but some guy is suppose to talk about it on 700 wlw this afternoon.

Maybe Ohio should adjust the gas tax biannually to ensure that sufficient funds are generated to pay for maintenance on the roads.  Maybe that would get everyone's attention.

The gas tax should be based on a percentage of the purchase price, rather than a flat amount of X cents per gallon. Thus  when people drive less as gas prices rise, funding for road maintenance and repairs might continue to come in at the same or similar amounts.

 

A global energy war looms

Jeremy Warner, Telegraph/UK

 

Here’s an alarming chart to ponder. HSBC has calculated what would happen to energy consumption by 2050 given plausible forecasts for economic growth and assuming no constraint on resources, or that humans carry on using energy in the “taken for granted” way they do at the moment.

 

As you can see, demand in China, India and other emerging markets soars, but there is also quite considerable growth from advanced economies too. The big picture is that with an additional one billion cars on the road, demand for oil would grow 110pc to more than 190 million barrels per day. Total demand for energy would rise by a similar order of magnitude, doubling the amount of carbon in the atmosphere to more than three and a half times the amount climate change scientists think would keep temperatures at safe levels.

 

It scarcely needs saying that regardless of the environmental consequences, energy industries would struggle to cope, and more likely would find it impossible. We may or may not already be perilously close to peak oil – or maximum productive capacity – but nobody believes the industry could produce double what it does at the moment, however clever it becomes in tapping previously uncommercial or inaccessible reserves.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jeremywarner/100009856/a-global-energy-war-looms/

The chart is a useful demonstration of why "past performance is no guarantee of future results," to borrow a financial trope.  It doesn't indicate much more than that, and it certainly doesn't justify the lecture that that UK columnist goes on to give the US about reducing our consumption to European levels and his ever so smug (and completely unsupported) assertion that we could suddenly dramatically reduce our energy consumption without harming our living standards.  Rising energy consumption and rising energy use almost always go hand in hand, as do the converse.  Likewise, the inclusion of carbon capture technology after energy efficiency and energy mix is out of place.  The first two are obvious, but of course, work on both of those is already happening in America.  It isn't happening as fast as the environmental lobby would like (notwithstanding that the enviro lobby often seems to argue against itself when it comes to alternative energy sources such as wind and nuclear, though of course that may simply mean that "the environmental lobby" is no more monolithic than "the energy industry").

 

The good news from America's university and corporate laboratories laying the groundwork for a smooth transition to a more efficient and cleaner energy economy continues to roll out.

 

Technology to dramatically decrease the charging time of electric cars is at least in prototype form: http://www.kurzweilai.net/nano-electrodes-may-lead-to-phones-that-charge-in-seconds-electric-cars-in-minutes

 

Some of the leading minds in the country are working on different ways of increasing both the absolute effectiveness and the cost-effectiveness of solar power technology:

MIT: http://www.kurzweilai.net/solar-funnel-concentrates-solar-energy-100-times

IBM: http://www.physorg.com/news185093054.html

Stanford (and a private sector spinoff): http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24623/?a=f

USDOE (Brookhaven & Los Alamos): http://www.kurzweilai.net/transparent-conductive-material-could-lead-to-power-generating-windows

The list goes on.

 

Wind is a simpler power source and probably doesn't have the future that solar does, but the tech sector has not been standing still on that front, either:

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21666/?a=f

http://www.physorg.com/news165082424.html

 

And, of course, increasing numbers of car manufacturers are getting into the electric car game--not just high-end startup Tesla (now in partnership with Toyota), but GM and Nissan as well, at the minimum.  The cost per watt of solar continues to drop towards grid parity, and our manufacturing capacity continues to climb as well, meaning that we are growing our ability to crank out large amounts of panels in a hurry if it ever becomes truly necessary (which I don't expect--I fully expect that normal, organic growth in the sector will slowly displace increasingly scarce fossil fuels through natural adaptation unforced by any government mandate).

 

If you're determined to focus only on the negative, whether out of the sense that fostering a sense of crisis is the only way to spur political action in a direction that you want or out of simply being a generally negative person, you're going to end up painting others--and possibly yourself--an extremely misleading picture of where we stand.  If there's a "global energy war," I think we're going to be pretty well armed to fight it.  Not only that, but we will be able to fight it while dramatically increasing our energy consumption per capita.  The globe does not suffer from an energy shortage and will not for centuries.  It suffers from an innovation shortage--a shortage of the ability to recover the prodigious amounts of energy on and within this planet (and constantly reaching it) currently untapped.  That is where the attention needs to be--and the people looking at the problem clearly understand that, which is why we have so many huge names working on that problem now.

I find the negative much more reflective of how I feel about the present and future. I don't find much enjoyable about Ohio or even in America anymore. This schlock, plastic, fast-food, cookie-cutter excuse for a state and country wears me down and bores me to the point that I increasingly don't care what happens to it. If you like the way we're going, I'm happy for you. Believe it or not, but I am not posting articles to convince anyone do anything except not be surprised when oil exceeds $100 (oops, too late -- twice). Quite frankly, I can't debate you because I don't even read these articles anymore (the positive or negative) but I share them in case anyone wants to read them. Here's one with a nifty headline....

 

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-03-22/won%E2%80%99t-innovation-substitution-and-efficiency-keep-us-growing

I just heard a report  that gas may get upto $7 a gallon by the 4th of July.  The second largest economy in the world(Japan) pays about $6.70 (USD) a gallon now.

 

Source?

 

And gas MAY go up to $10 a gallon too, but that doesn't mean it will. 

 

I don't have a link but some guy is suppose to talk about it on 700 wlw this afternoon.

 

Well, did you listen to the interview?  What did he have to say?  Why does he think gas will be $7/gal by the 4th of July?

Efficiency and conversion to electric vehicles is a good start, but probably insufficient to retain our car-centered culture.  We still have too many lane-miles of roadway to maintain.  With city budgets drowning (and the State of Ohio about to dramatically cut payments to cities), we better get used to lots of potholes.

^There needs to be a correction in lane miles per capita in this country and I think there will be as gas prices go up and usage drops.  When that happens the government will (at least they SHOULD) drastically reduce the amount of new road projects and focus much more on maintenance.  People will also likely move closer to work which may increase density in urban areas or at least reduce the rate of sprawl significantly. 

 

I see a road building moratorium of sorts in our future due to gas tax revenue slow downs, budget shortfalls, and maintenance activity that is long overdue.  This moratorium will give us a chance to let our population catch up a little bit and make that lane miler per capita number a little more manageable.

 

  ^But population is projected to peak soon in Ohio and then decline. Besides that, population in itself does not gurantee the ability to construct or maintain roads.