Posted on

On The Table

Leaving it on the table, that is. A chart from the Economist, via Yglesias. Interactive even.

Everyone who doesn’t watch Fox News knows that gas prices in the U.S. are the lowest in the 1st world; what might be less appreciated is how little we tax this precious little commodity. Like R.A. says in the original, the ultra low prices fuel the dependency – we can’t get off the stuff. And then we have to castigate any ideas for getting onto trains or sidewalks. And vociferously defend… the obscene oil company profits that are a result. It’s a thoroughly embarassing state of affairs.

Except we’re not embarrassed. Power of Pride, I guess.

But hey… pssst: gas is getting more and more expense anyway. And as it does, we’re still not diverting any of the money to other services or incentivising better habits or planning for the $5 $7 gas that is as sure of a thing as the drink in my hand right now.

Bumper sticker idea of the day: More expensive lessons, please.

Posted on

Self-Sanctioning

$5 per gallon gasoline is still in your future.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) isbeing chaired by Iran at the moment. And Iran thinks the run-up of the price of crude to over $90 a barrel is just dandy and requires no new OPEC meetings or adjustment of production quotas among members.

Meanwhile, the US is back to using 20 million barrels a day of petroleum, an increase of 4.4 percent over last year this time. The US, the superhog of gas hogs, uses nearly a fourth the world’s daily petroleum production despite having only a twentieth of the world’s population. Increased US demand, along with rapidly growing demand in Asia, helps account for the relatively high petroleum prices. Some analysts think you could see another big run-up in oil prices in 2011 reminiscent of 2008, with gasoline prices going to $4 a gallon by this summer and then ultimately going on up to $5 a gallon.

That and everything that goes with it will be re-run from 2008. You remember that time, when the whole country gathered around the national dining room table to contemplate living closer to work, buying lighter cars and building trains? Me neither.

And good to remember that as some will scream bloody murder at $4 gas, others would be relieved at such a bargain. Evil relativism. Good thing we just elected a bunch of know-nothings deciders to lead us on all this important stuff, i.e., we’re so screwed.

Posted on

Drilling It into Your Head

NPR has apparently found a very sturdy drum and they’ve been beating it night & day. This Morning’s Edition:

President Obama’s approach to domestic oil drilling has shifted over this year. Taken together, those shifts have managed to anger just about everyone in the oil drilling debate at one time or another.

Great. 100% chance of this, right? What an excellent, safe, can’t miss, no interest news story. Dog bites dog. We’ll trot out an oil industry shill and an officer of the Sierra Club and they’ll light up the night with worry. Think I’m kidding?

“It’s risky, it’s dangerous, and there’s a better way to meet America’s energy needs than to engage in a set of activities that are proven to be unsafe,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.

…

“Why six months? What does that mean?” asks Rayola Dougher, a senior economic adviser for the American Petroleum Institute.

Well, Rayola, part of what it means, if you must know, is that we’ll call off all drilling for six months and try to find out WTF happened to make all the shellfish have a sad when all they were doing was preparing to become food. It (the story) trudges on and on.

But then, this evening, they were striking up the band again. I mean, I only have a ten-minute drive both ways. This time it was workers from the oil industry, including medical personnel living along the Gulf who treat injured workers. It seems that they are all for not having another accident in the Gulf, and even understand some the malformations the industry itself has performed on the wetlands guarding the land and sea from each other. But

The uncertainty has rippled through the oil services industry, and puts some workers in a difficult position as they consider what the moratorium can achieve.

Lavonne Martin of Baton Rouge works for a company that provides offshore medical care.

“As an environmentalist, as a fisherman, as someone who loves our Louisiana coast, I understand it. … However, as somebody who, you know, makes a living working in the oil industry, I’m very concerned about it and what the future … economic impact may be,” Martin says.

The environment and all that… becomes a blur when connected to livelihoods through the paycheck, especially for those so close to the action. There is truth to this and it is painful and complex – the withering of a way of life, and specifically the means for powering it but not just that, is very difficult to separate from the idea that life will continue. Much less how it will. There are no poetic terms for this, not at first. These are only the first hard questions. But the reporting seems to still hold the outcome in the balance, to still pull for business and people who depend on a paycheck (!) to prevail, as if we can sustain a way of life that is being destroyed by our efforts to sustain a way of life. It’s that or nothing so that it must be.

And the preoccupation with uncertainty is… certainly curious. We’ve come to absolutely depend upon some outlandish by its very premise level of confidence in what to expect – or else panic sets in. This type of caution, need for guarantees, this quest for certainty, especially with regard to large scale endeavors, leads eventually in all the wrong directions.

Maybe we should actually embrace uncertainty for a while. Maybe it could mean many of these same people would be as loyal to and hardworking for schemes that weren’t concentrated on a dwindling resource. Who can be sure?

Posted on

God Hates Texas

As a young Dallas Cowboys fan in the seventies, I thought maybe s/he was just indifferent. But now Governor Rick Perry has confirmed the worst.

Later in his response, Perry said he feared a “knee-jerk reaction” to the oil spill, and said the oil spill could be just another “act of God that cannot be prevented“:

“We don’t know what the event that has allowed for this massive oil to be released,” Perry said alongside several other governors on a panel Monday. “And until we know that, I hope we don’t see a knee-jerk reaction across this country that says we’re going to shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, because the cost to this country will be staggering.” Perry questioned whether the spill was “just an act of God that occurred” and said that any “politically driven” decisions could put the U.S. in further economic peril. “From time to time there are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented,” Perry said.

We’re still in the early-middle of the post-beginning period of trying not to understand what has happened as God corporations have assumed their rights as a supra-governmental entities. There are still many more contortions along the lines of Joe Barton to go (actually, we won’t even believe Newt’s next turn in nuanced Randianism) some of which won’t even make re-written history books. They’ve spent decades training us, after all, selecting the best people for the most important but also the most minor offices, and with all of that time and investment spent cultivating the reality of benevolent selfishism, we’re not going to just be able to turn on a dime – like a dynamically positioned drilling rig, for instance – and just blame them for something they actually did.

I mean, come on.

Posted on

Before Petroleum

One thing that is very difficult to get to, maybe not as difficult as a gushing volcano of oil a mile below the surface of the Gulf, but… just how did we get o this place? With major corporate interests having us all right where they want us, able to create a catastrophe but still leave us unconvinced that we/they should stop the activity that created the situation in the first place. And they are right, in a way, because what would that be? And on top of that, we blame our political leaders for not being able to immediately fix the situation – but not for creating the atmosphere that made the situation possible. See. Difficult. Where do you even start? Maybe 1876?

Johnson’s rocky relations with Congress resulted in an impeachment trial. Johnson survived in office, and was followed by Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant, who was elected in 1868, and reelected in 1872.

The eight years of the Grant administration came to be known for scandal. Financial chicanery, often involving railroad barons, shocked the country. The national economy faced difficult times. And federal troops were still stationed throughout the south in 1876 to enforce Reconstruction.

The Candidates In the Election of 1876

The Republican Party was expected to nominate a popular senator from Maine, James G. Blaine. But when it was revealed that Blaine had some involvement in a railroad scandal, Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio, was nominated at a convention that required seven ballots. Acknowledging his role as a compromise candidate, Hayes delivered a letter at the end of the convention indicating he would only serve one term if elected.

On the Democratic side, the nominee was Samuel J. Tilden, the governor of New York. Tilden was known as a reformer, and had attracted considerable attention when, as New York’s attorney general, he prosecuted William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, the famously corrupt political boss of New York City.

The two parties did not have tremendous differences on the issues. And as it was still considered unseemly for presidential candidates to campaign, most of the actual campaigning was done by surrogates. Hayes conducted what was called a “front porch campaign,” in which he talked to supporters and reporters on his porch in Ohio and his comments were transmitted to newspapers.

Waving the Bloody Shirt

The election season degenerated into the opposing sides launching vicious personal attacks on the opposition candidate. Tilden, who had become wealthy as a lawyer in New York City, was accused of participating in fraudulent railroad deals. And the Republicans made much of the fact that Tilden had not served in the Civil War.

Read all about it.

Posted on

Live from Hopedale

Best op-ed in the Times this week is again by Bob Herbert.

The risks unleashed by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig are profound — the latest to be set in motion by the scandalous, rapacious greed of the oil industry and its powerful allies and enablers in government. America is selling its soul for oil.

Uh-huh. The double-bite of the green metaphor just gets more twisted and foul.

Posted on

Disentangle

So there’s this major, slow-motion environmental catastrophe underway, and we’re three weeks in. My parents are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary – the family all pulled together and chipped in on a Caribbean cruise, for which they leave on Thursday. Now I wonder if they were going to see any evidence of the sheen getting into the loop current when they slip past the Keys. So there’s that.

It’s difficult to think of much else when something like this going on and, by all evidence, worsening by the day. But in terms of dismantling the system that got us here there’s actually plenty to talk about, think about and prepare for. But just thinking about it, how would we begin to lessen our dependence on deep-sea oil drilling? Maybe we think about pricing gasoline to reflect the true cost of taking it out of the ground, much less burning it. Maybe we try to discover how to use less oil on a per capita, per day basis. Well, how do you start down that road do that? Build more highways?

The umbrella group for America’s state DOTs, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, has started a major new push for, you guessed it, more highways. The new campaign argues for highway expansion in urban areas as if fifty years of similar policies hadn’t led to a dead end of sprawl, pollution, and oil dependence.

As described in an important post onMobilizing the Region by Ya-Ting Liu of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, AASHTO has released a series of reports and a new website making “the case for capacity.” The website is filled with friendly explanations of “what’s so great about an interstate” and promises that “urban interstates are the new ‘Main Street.'” As unbelievable as those claims must be to anyone living next door to the Bruckner Expressway or parked in traffic on the Cross-Bronx, AASHTO’s stated intention to massively expand the urban highway system is all too real.

Does this make sense? In a certain kind of way it would, if we were looking for further rationales to continue drilling for oil anywhere we could find it – because we need all we can find – and we need to fulfill the other side of this feedback loop. But we’re not. In fact, that’s not actually our problem at all. At the moment, our problem is finding a way to cap an out-of-control oil well a mile below the surface fifty miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, the result of an exploded rig that was built without the proper safety precautions envisioned for just such an incident. So you could say our problems are a little more acute than merely finding the budget to dispassionately build more highways, to grow, as it were. Oh the once-upon-a-time whimsy of such a luxury, right now.

This disaster is testing our resolve and ability to ignore it, and I truly hope our indifference carries the day. But after just a short while now, and it hasn’t really been that long, it seems like we’re beginning to fight something else, something taking the shape of an ocean-borne oil slick you might see during a once-in-a-lifetime vacation on a twelve-story cruise ship. At first it may appear to be out of place; but in the end, it has as much right to be there as you do.

Posted on

Ask Anybody

Or everybody. Last week, BP started asking for suggestions on ways to clean up the oil in the Gulf. Innocentive, indeed.

Challenge Overview
Recently, an explosion on an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico caused both loss of life and a sizable and ongoing oil spill. We are asking Solvers worldwide to respond quickly with ideas and approaches to react to this very serious environmental threat.

This is an Emergency Situation Challenge and will be quite different than any other Challenge we have run on the InnoCentive website. No one has requested us to do this and InnoCentive is not getting paid to run this Challenge. We are doing it because we believe our Solver base can and will help and we will do everything we can to get solutions into the hands of the appropriate responders. This is an experiment and we believe our Solvers will answer this call for help. We believe trying to mitigate this international disaster is the right thing to do.

  • Your submission will identify and describe a solution that can help prevent further damage caused by the explosion and ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You are required to give InnoCentive and any emergency respondents a free, perpetual, and non-exclusive license to use any information submitted for this Challenge specifically to be used for this oil spill crisis. You will still retain ownership of any idea submitted.

Look for many new exciting Emergency Situation Challenge(tm) branded products on store shelves soon. Toothpaste. barbecue sauce, charcoal…

Posted on

StayGreen(tm)

Captain Obvious here with a report from the bridge: A connection has been spotted between this

In an example of Republican obstructionism rendered beautiful by its simplicity, the GOP yesterday killed a House bill that would increase funding for scientific research and math and science education by forcing Democrats to vote in favor of federal employees viewing pornography.

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the ranking member of the House science committee, introduced amotion to recommit, a last-ditch effort to change a bill by sending it back to the committee with mandatory instructions.

In this case, Republicans included a provision that would bar the federal government from paying the salaries of employees who’ve been disciplined for viewing pornography at work.

and this.

Size of Oil Spill Underestimated, Scientists Say

Can we not just stop for a second and look at the long-tail of this form of stupid that seems to be on sale everywhere? Sweet baby in the manger, the short tail should even scare the crap out of us.

There is nothing to fear except but unless you can’t see the obvious.

Posted on

Adultery and Green Tractors

A red future or a green mist, the language of color is local.

The Duluth, Georgia-based company has an as-yet small presence in China, but Richenhagen believes the world’s No. 3 maker of tractors, combines and other farm equipment has one big advantage versus world No. 1 Deere & Co (DE.N) when it comes to cracking open that market. Around the world, Deere’s wide range of farm machines stand out for their bright green hoods.

“We have a competitive advantage compared to some of our colleagues,” Richenhagen said at the Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit in Chicago. “Green is a very bad color in China.”

Specifically, green is associated with adultery — wearing a green hat is a way a man could signal that his wife had cheated on him.

“Red is the color of luck. And therefore we will go there with Massey-Ferguson,” which uses red hoods on its tractors, said Richenhagen, who comes from Germany.

Good to know. Just goes to show how much you can over-estimate and choose poorly, well or with luck. But not usually so awesome. Ly.

And speaking of business-as-usually, we turn to Russia Today (doesn’t everybody?) to see what’s going on in the Golfo de México.