Peak gas in Victoria, Australia
for 5 uker siden
...om det som opptar ham akkurat nå, etter innfallsmetoden.
Ærlige forsøk på å finne mening i en forvirrende verden, men uten å bli for redd for å ta feil; for som Francis Bacon påpekte:
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
Stanford climate researcher Stephen H. Schneider, a long-time friend, colleague and Edge contributor, died last month at the age of 65 of a heart attack while on a flight to London.
It turned out that all those parameters that mattered to the climate model, and all those parameters that mattered to the economics model, while they still mattered a bit in the coupled model, were completely trumped by two parameters that controlled the behavior of the coupled system. Climate sensitivity was the big gorilla from the climate side, and the discount rate—how much we value the future—emerged as dominant from the economic side.(mine uthevinger)
Everyone is familiar with the 'discount rate' in the financial markets.
The original neoclassical assumption was that the discount rate curve was exponential, meaning that we discounted the same from period to period. Actual economic experiments however show that the shape of the discount curve is hyperbolic, or as Harvard economist David Laibson prefers quasi-hyperbolic. This means that the early periods have much steeper discount rates than later periods. Laibsons research indicates that peoples discount rates are 12% during days 0-5 but drop to 4% in days 20-25. We REALLY prefer the present.
Understanding that stress increases peoples discount rates suggests to me that the events surrounding peak oil (and perhaps climate change) will reach an inflection point. We need to hit the emotional triggers well ahead of peak oil. Once people are stressed and things become difficult, accessing peoples rational minds will be all the harder.
A commodity is a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is fungible, i.e. equivalent no matter who produces it. Examples are petroleum, notebook paper, milk or copper.[1] The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Stereo systems, on the other hand, have many aspects of product differentiation, such as the brand, the user interface, the perceived quality etc. And, the more valuable a stereo is perceived to be, the more it will cost.
In contrast, one of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole. Well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. Generally, these are basic resources and agricultural products such as iron ore, crude oil, coal, ethanol, salt, sugar, coffee beans, soybeans, aluminium, copper, rice, wheat, gold, silver, palladium, and platinum. Soft commodities are goods that are grown, while hard commodities are the ones that are extracted through mining.
There is another important class of energy commodities which includes electricity, gas, coal and oil. Electricity has the particular characteristic that it is either impossible or uneconomical to store, hence, electricity must be consumed as soon as it is produced.
Commoditization occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently. As such, goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants have become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and silicon chips.
The Triple Crisis Blog and The Daly News blog are engaged in an interesting discussion of how the field of Ecological Economics treats money, partly in response to Alejandro Nadal’s piece on Triple Crisis, “Money Matters, Mr. Daly.” Herman Daly posted a comment there and posted a piece on the subject on his own blog, “Money and the Steady State Economy.” Rob Dietz also has a related post there, “Money is a COW.” Here, Nadal, author of the forthcoming volume from Zed Books, on the macroeconomics of sustainability, responds:
10. The Best Place in History (for this Commission) Would be No Place At All.
Most people assume that “bipartisan commissions” are designed to fail: they are given thorny (or even impossible) issues and told to make recommendations which Congress is free to ignore or reject. In many cases — yours is no exception — the goal is to defer recognition of the difficulties for as long as possible.
You are plainly not equipped by disposition or resources to take on the true cause of deficits now and in the future: the financial crisis. Recommendations based on CBO’s unrealistic budget and economic outlooks are destined to collapse in failure. Specifically, if cuts are proposed and enacted in Social Security and Medicare, they will hurt millions, weaken the economy, and the deficits will not decline. It’s a lose-lose proposition, with no gainers except a few predatory funds, insurance companies and such who would profit, for some time, from a chaotic private marketplace.
Thus the interesting twist in your situation is that the Republic would be better served by advancing no proposals at all.
Thank you again for the opportunity to present this statement.
Climate change is now acknowledged as a potential threat to biodiversity and human well-being, and many countries are seeking to reduce their emissions by shifting from fossil fuels to other energy sources. One potential side effect with this switch is the increase in area required by some renewable energy production techniques [1]–[5]. Energy production techniques vary in the spatial extent in which production activities occur, which we refer to as their energy sprawl [2], [3], defined as the product of the total quantity of energy produced annually (e.g., TW hr/yr) and the land-use intensity of production (e.g. km2of habitat per TW hr/yr). While many studies have quantified the likely effect of climate change on the Earth's biodiversity due to climate-driven habitat loss, concluding that a large proportion of species could be driven extinct [6]–[8], relatively few studies have evaluated the habitat impact of future energy sprawl. It is important to understand the potential habitat effects of energy sprawl, especially in reference to the loss of specific habitat types, since habitats vary markedly in the species and ecosystem processes they support.
[...]
The land-use intensity of different energy production techniques (i.e., the inverse of power density [16], [17]), as measured in km2 of impacted land in 2030 per terawatt-hour per year, varies over three orders of magnitude (Fig. 3). Nuclear power (1.9–2.8 km2/TW hr/yr), coal (2.5–17.0 km2/TW hr/yr) and geothermal (1.0–13.9 km2/TW hr/yr) are the most compact by this metric. Conversely, biofuels (e.g., for corn ethanol 320–375 km2/TW hr/yr) and biomass burning of energy crops for electricity (433–654 km2/TW hr/yr) take the most space per unit power. Most renewable energy production techniques, like wind and solar power, have intermediate values of this metric.
[...]the practice of asking oneself questions could arise as a natural side effect of asking questions of others, and its utility would be similar: it would be a behavior that could be recognized to enhance one's prospects by promoting better-informed action-guidance. All that has to be the case for this practice to have this utility is for the preexisting access-relations within the the brain of an individual to be less than optimal. Suppose, in other words, that although the right information for some purpose is already in the brain, it is in the hands of the wrong specialist; the subsystem in the brain that needs the information cannot obtain it directly from the specialist -- because evolution has simply not got around to providing such a "wire". Provoking the specialist to "broadcast" the information into the environment, however, and then relying on an existing pair of ears (and an auditory system) to pick it up, would be a way of building a "virtual wire" between the relevant subsystems.(Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, s. 195 f)
Such an act of autostimulation could blaze a valuable new trail between one's internal components. Crudely put, pushing some information through one's ears and auditory system may well happen to stimulate just the sorts of connections one is seeking, may trip just the right associative mechanism, tease just the right mental morsel to the tip of one's tongue.
I wrote several papers some years back (2002) about the pressure the big financial market institutions (particularly the Sydney Futures Exchange) were placing on the then federal government to continue issuing public debt despite the government running increasing surpluses. Nowhere did we read the contradiction of this position.
Which is: according to all the logic that the government and these institutions continually pumped out that the government was financially constrained and had to issue debt to “finance” itself – so if they are running surpluses, they should not be issuing debt! Of-course, the beginning logic is nonsense in the first place but they don’t know that or at least, admit to it publicly.
So the bottom line in this debate (which led to a Treasury Inquiry) was that the demand for continued public debt-issuance even though the federal government was running increasing surpluses appeared to be special pleading by an industry sector for public assistance in the form of risk-free public securities for investors as well as opportunities for trading profits, commissions, management fees, and consulting service and research fees.
In a Submission to Debt Review, that I wrote with my friend and sometime co-author Warren Mosler, we observed that:
Furthermore, and ironically, their arguments are inconsistent with rhetoric forthcoming from the same financial sector interests in general about the urgency for less government intervention, more privatisation (for example, Telstra), more welfare cutbacks, and the deregulation of markets in general, including various utilities and labour markets.
In other words, that is, in blog language, they were just self-serving greedy hypocrites.
During the first 35 years of the Green Revolution, global grain production doubled, greatly reducing food shortages, but at high environmental cost (1-5). In addition to its effects on greenhouse gases (1, 6, 7), agriculture affects ecosystems by the use and release of limiting resources that influence ecosystem functioning (nitrogen, phosphorus, and water), release of pesticides, and conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture. These sources of global change may rival climate change in environmental and societal impacts (2, 8). Population size and per capita consumption are assumed to be the two greatest drivers of global environmental change. Humans currently appropriate more than a third of the production of terrestrial ecosystems and about half of usable freshwaters, have doubled terrestrial nitrogen supply and phosphorus liberation, have manufactured and released globally significant quantities of pesticides, and have initiated a major extinction event (2-4, 8-10).
Maybe. But with its massive store of savings, Japan didn’t have to worry about depending on the kindness of creditors in China and the Mideast as its bond rates scraped along at zero. The U.S. does.
The truth is that Japan was actually in that same precarious position, a decade ago. With Japanese government debt skyrocketing because of massive fiscal deficits, all of the ratings agencies, the IMF, the OECD — they all issued horrendous warnings against Japan. Japanese bond investors remember very well that JGBs were downgraded repeatedly, to the point where Japan’s debt was rated lower than that of Botswana, because the ratings agencies were so sure that at some point the whole thing would come crashing down and that interest rates would soar. But it never happened. And the reason is easy to understand, once you grasp the concept of a balance sheet recession. The amount of money that the government has to
borrow and spend to sustain GDP is exactly equal to the amount of excess savings generated within the private sector of the economy. So that money is actually available within the private sector, even in the U.S., even in the U.K.
And the U.S. is no longer a low savings rate country; the last statistic was over 6%, higher than Japan. What’s more, with companies also increasing their savings, there’s no “crowding out” and banks are only too happy to lend to the government, as the last borrower standing — and also because they don’t have to keep as much capital against loans to the government as they would against private sector loans, allowing the banks to rebuild their profits and balance sheets.
It sounds almost too good to be true —
It’s not. I believe that as more and more people in the U.S. realize that this is the mechanism at work, the fear of interest rates rising will be increasingly reduced, and I won’t be surprised to see long bond rates in the U.S. falling from
where they are now. In any event, whether you start with a high savings rate or a low savings rate, once a country enters a balance sheet recession because the private sector is paying down debts, you end up having excess savings in the private sector and it is those excess savings that the government has to borrow and spend. It doesn’t have to borrow externally. So the U.S. doesn’t have to borrow from China or anywhere else. But because that’s contrary to the mind set
for the last 10 or 20 years, it’s very hard for people to come around to that realization.
You spend quite a few pages of your book discussing why so many economists
haven’t seen what you see —
Well, I think it is because so-called neo-classical economics starts from the very premise that the private sector is maximizing profits and everything
is built off that premise. Besides, it was also a question of what data they have been looking at. For most of the post-war period, people were maximizing profits in the West, so no one had to look for other possibilities. But
during the Depression, and in the 1990s in Japan, the private sector was actually minimizing debt, not maximizing profits. As I wrote, people minimizing debt are never anxious to advertise that they’re effectively bankrupt. As a result, the true nature of a balance sheet recession was invisible, inaudible. Companies working
to minimize debt are the least likely to share that fact with the outside world.
What we in the western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy – zero interest rates plus quantitative easing – did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. [Koo derimot sier: So we have a situation where fiscal policy is actually controlling the effectiveness of monetary policy. It’s a complete reversal of what almost everyone alive today learned in school — that monetary policy is the way to go.]Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect(A Greek crisis is coming to America, Niall Ferguson/Financial Times, min utheving)
For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.
Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven”. US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.
I am not a political expert but I respect and listen to the insights of many who are. Their messages are eerily consistent, and quite concerning.
The political atmosphere in Washington is tense and increasingly polarized. Bipartisan backing for measures is harder. With the political center shrinking, the ability to “manage to the middle” is growing more elusive while the more partisan wings don’t command sufficient broad-based support.
The situation isn’t helped by the diminished trust in key institutions, both public and private
[...]
These are consequential political and economic questions. They speak to a more protracted post-crisis resetting of the U.S. economy -- what Pimco labeled last year as a bumpy multiyear journey to a new normal.
All this is consistent with the academic literature on post-crisis periods. Such research reminds us of the extent to which massive disruptions -- such as the one experienced in 2007-09 -- expose structural cracks that, at best, can only be masked temporarily by a massive cyclical policy response.
Resetting the U.S.
To make things even more complex, the resetting of the U.S. is occurring in the context of secular shifts in global growth and wealth dynamics -- principally on account of some systemically important emerging economies (such as Brazil, China and India) having reached development breakout stages.
The evidence is overwhelming: Economic and political indicators are urging us to adopt a forward-looking structural mindset. Yet too many markets -- and, I would also argue, too many private and public institutions -- seem hostage to cyclical forces.
Hubbert wrote virtually nothing about details of the “decline side” of his Hubbert Curve, except to mention that the
ultimate shape of the decline side would depend upon the facts and not on any assumptions or formulae. The decline
side does not have to be symmetrical to the ascending side of the curve - it is just easier to draw it as such, but no rules
apply. The ascending curve depends on the skill/luck of the explorationists while the descending side may fall off more
rapidly due to the public’s acquired taste for petroleum products - or more slowly due to government controls to reduce
consumption.
In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission allows companies to call reserves “proved” only if the oil lies near a producing well and there is “reasonable certainty” that it can be recovered profitably at current oil prices, using existing technology. So a proved reserve estimate in the U.S. is roughly equal to a P90 estimate.
Underinvestment in energy and agriculture are among the biggest economic threats facing the world in 2010, according to [the World Economic Forum's Global Risks study].
From corn to crude, prices for a wide range of commodities are on the rise across the globe, a trend that underscores -- but could also hinder -- a gathering economic recovery.
In recent months, global food prices have been growing at a rate that rivals some of the wildest months of 2008, when food riots erupted across the developing world. Higher prices could be a positive sign that companies are gearing up for a rebound in consumer spending, or the harbinger of a return to the upward spiral that plagued consumers before the recession took hold.
A severe food shortage is on its way, according to well-regarded investor Jim Rogers. Food inventories are the lowest in decades and "[m]any farmers cannot get loans to buy fertilizer now, even though we have big shortages developing," Rogers said on CNBC.
"If farmers were no longer incentivized to feed cows corn, and if we could derail our cannibalistic policy choices that couple food and fuel, we could get a clue as to the actual relationship between food supply and demand," he said, referring to the inflation in corn and soybean prices over the last few years.
Call it the Sophie's Choice of globalization: make middle-class consumers out of the global poor and they create new business, but they deplete resources and damage the environment. Move to conserve resources and protect the planet, and you condemn hundreds of millions of people to life as second-class citizens.Som en kan forvente av et finansmagasin, artikkelen handler om hvordan man kan tjene penger på å følge miljøforskrifter og produsere for de mange som ønsker å ta steget inn i den globale middelklassen... argumenter vi har hørt før, fra økonomer som Galbraith d.y. og Reinert. Overbevisende nok, så langt de går; men det er økonomer vi snakker om her, og jeg er ikke overbevist om at de har klart å fri seg fra myten om infinite substitutability, at Den Hellige Hånd med teknomagi skal trylle fram alternativer til olje og gass (og mere vann, og ...) når vi trenger dem, i de kvanta vi trenger dem.
But it doesn't have to be that way, says C.K. Prahalad, a professor of corporate strategy at the University of Michigan's business school. He's the creator of something like a Grand Unification Theory of Globalization: that environmentalism, development and profitmaking are not only compatible but also interdependent.
Getting governments on board with regulation is important, says Prahalad, but not nearly as much as convincing businesses to stop fretting over the cost of environmental laws. "The industrial system as we have it today cannot deal with another 4 billion people," he says. "What you see is the fairly early stages of the next industrial revolution, and the emerging markets are becoming the laboratory for that."
Conversion ratios for CTL are generally estimated to be between 1-2 barrels/ton coal. This puts a strict limitation on future CTL capacity imposed by future coal production volumes, regardless of other factors such as economics, emissions or environmental concern. Assuming that 10% of world coal production can be diverted to CTL, the contribution to liquid fuel supply will be limited to only a few Mb/d. This prevents CTL from becoming a viable mitigation plan for liquid fuel shortage on a global scale. However, it is still possible for individual nations to derive significant shares of their fuel supply from CTL, but those nations must also have access to equally significant coal production capacities. It is unrealistic to claim that CTL provides a feasible solution to liquid fuels shortages created by peak oil. For the most part, it can only be a minor contributor and must be combined with other strategies.(A review on coal to liquid fuels and its coal consumption, min utheving)
The greatest potential for biofuel production within the present agricultural system lies in using inedible fractions such as residues and organic waste, e.g. mould attacked matter and crops of inferior quality. Biogas production has a greater potential than ethanol production since a higher proportion of the residues can be used for energy production. The calculated global potential of biogas production is in theory sufficient to cover up to one fourth of the present consumption of fossil fuels within the global transport sector. However, there are infrastructural challenges with biogas production and distribution, and it is expensive to upgrade to motor fuel quality. Hence biogas could possibly be of better use in other applications than as motor fuel. Its use within agriculture would reduce agriculture’s dependency on fossil energy, improving food security.(Johansson, Liljequist, Ohlander, Aleklett: Agriculture as provider of both food and fuel (PDF!), min utheving)
Fjärde generationens kärnkraftverk kommer att stå klara att användas kommersiellt kring år 2030 om allt går som planerat.
Gazprom has so much natural gas under the tundra of Siberia that its energy resources are equivalent to all the oil and gas fields owned by western energy companies put together
Mexico synker stadig lenger ned i konflikten mellom staten og narkokartellene. 2010 kan bli et blodig år i Mexico.
I’ve been predicting the collapse of the Mexican Nation-State since 2006. It turns out that was a bit premature. But with violence flaring, the potential for collapse in Mexico is once again in the headlines. Oil production continues to fall, border violence is up, and the government is preparing for a showdown with the drug cartels. I’ll argue below that the government will keep the wheels on through 2009, but that the Mexican state will collapse shortly thereafter, ushering in the beginning of the end of the Nation-State.
[høy giring i finanssektoren] would further explain the lack of any "net savings" improvement since the start of the crisis -- as the financial sector was suddenly and rapidly thrown into delevering, assets were being destroyed and money disappearing from the system. the resultant loss of savings in spite of the government's best efforts could explain how the current account deficit suddenly improved while "net savings" actually declined.
Fears that Britain may be heading for its first sovereign debt crisis since the 1970s hit a new intensity after Pimco, the world's biggest bond house, declared that it is starting to sell off its holdings of gilts.
The American investment group said it will be a net seller of UK Government bonds this year, at the very point when the Bank of England brings its £200bn programme of purchases to and end and the Treasury attempts to raise unprecedented sums through the capital markets.
[...]
Paul McCulley, a managing director at Pimco, said: "We are currently cutting back in the US and UK because... supply and demand dynamics are likely to be negatively affected as borrowing rises and central bank buying declines."
Folks, PIMCO has a record of being not only right but privvy to "analysis" that you and I simply never, ever have or will get access to. How that happens is the matter of some conjecture - there are many, myself included, who believe that they're privvy to information sources that "ordinary peons" never will be given access to and in the debt markets insider trading is (for the most part) legal.(A Warning To Western Governments And Investors)
As a result when an announcement like this is made you're a rank idiot to ignore it or believe "it doesn't matter." It most certainly does matter and the odds are that they're right - and if you go against them you will be proved in the fullness of time to not only be wrong but poor on top of it.
The recent history of Argentina is worth reflecting on in this regard. Argentina successfully defaulted on significant international debt obligations in 2002. Initially, FDI dried up completely when the default was announced. However, the Argentine government could not service the debt as its foreign currency reserves were gone and realised, to their credit, that borrowing from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would have required an austerity package that would have precipipated revolution. As it was riots broke out as citizens struggled to feed their children.(fra Why pander to the financial markets?)
Despite stringent criticism from the World’s financial power brokers (including the International Monetary Fund), the Argentine government refused to back down and in 2005 completed a deal whereby around 75 per cent of the defaulted bonds were swapped for others of much lower value with longer maturities.
[...]
The data is instructive. The resumption of growth has been strong and persistent (8.8 per cent in 2003, 9.0 per cent in 2004, 9.2 per cent in 2005, 8.5 per cent in 2006 and 8.7 per cent in 2007). Real wages have also risen modestly over the same period.
Official data shows that poverty rates (measured either as extreme poverty defined as not being able to eat properly and a more general poverty line defined by the minimum income needed for basic needs) have fallen dramatically since the abandonment of the neo-liberal fixed exchange rate system. Argentina demonstrated something that the World’s financial masters didn’t want anyone to know about. That a country with huge foreign debt obligations can default successfully and enjoy renewed fortune based on domestic employment growth strategies and more inclusive welfare policies without an IMF austerity program being needed. And then as growth resumes, renewed FDI floods in.
One commentator wrote a few years ago that that the Argentinian Government appears to have perpetuated the perfect crime. The Government offered the world financial markets a ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ settlment which was favourable to the local economy. At the time, the rhetoric claimed that countries that treat foreign creditors so badly would surely stagnate and suffer a FDI boycott. This is the standard neo-liberal line that is used to coerce debtor nations into compliance with the needs of ‘first-world’ capital largely defined through the aegis of the IMF. But the Argentinian case shows this paradigm to be toothless because the Government defied the major players including the IMF and the Argentine economy went on to boom despite it.
However, I think it's important to note that a potential game-changer has developed recently that could render that point of view [at vi er på et bølgende platå] obsolete (which is a kinder, gentler way of saying "wrong" :-). A couple of years ago, Iraqi oil production was declining and it didn't seem too likely the country would stabilize any time soon to allow that to change. However, the post-surge stabilization of Iraq has now allowed Iraqi oil production to start creeping up, and in 2009 the Iraqi oil ministry has announced large numbers of contracts with major oil companies to bring production up from the current 2.5mbd or so to 12 mbd over the course of the next 6-7 years. It is also announcing a series of projects to increase the physical export capacity of the country in line with these oil production projects.Dersom dette slår til vil Iraks produksjonskurve se ca. sånn ut:
It seems to me that the possibility that Iraq may actually succeed in doing this should be taken seriously.