Dagens Trippel

OK, disse er ikke veldig nye, men likevel veldig aktuelle:

Første, et interview med Gerald Celente i libertarianer-talerøret Daily Bell, hvor Celente vel må sies å snakke lett fra levra. Eller kanskje heller galleblæra... Om politikere:

You know what politicians are? When are people going to grow up? Politicians are the same jerks you hated in high school and college that wanted to be class president and head of the student council. The brown-nosers, suck-ups, overly-ambitious, insincere – and now they are telling you what to do and you are paying attention to them and you are bowing down?

I have a line: "Conservatives believe and liberals lie."

Arch rightwing conservatives, they actually believe their line of baloney. They say things like, "The only way we are going to make this country safe is to kill all them Muslims around the world." They actually believe that.

The liberals, on the other hand, you point out one transgression of freedom after another that Obama has committed and they will come up with a line of excuses a mile long. They're intellectually intelligent enough to know that they are lying but they don't have the courage or the self-respect to admit it.

For example, when Obama gets elected he says, the first day, 'I'm going to close Guantanamo in a year.' Guantanamo's still going on.

Om "teknokrater", fascister og Jesus:

Daily Bell: Okay. Here are some more trends questions ... some subjects, in no particular order. Give us some trends feedback, please. In other words, put them into economic and sociopolitical context for our readers. First one, the West – where are we headed?

Gerald Celente: The West is headed to dictatorship. It's already happening. The merger of state and corporate power is by definition called fascism. I just mentioned the Defense Authorization Act. Before you had that you had the abrogation of the Constitution under Bush, with the Patriot Act, which Obama reinstated and made even tougher by signing this bill. When I say the merger of state and corporate powers, look at the $16.1 trillion that the Federal Reserve has funneled into businesses around the world. Whatever happened to that thing called capitalism? This is not capitalism; it's fascism! The more societies break down and the bigger the screw-ups at the top, the harder they clamp down on the bottom. You see it going on around the world; they call it austerity measures. How about calling it enslavement?

Daily Bell: European Union and the euro ...

Gerald Celente: Same thing... It's fascism. They came up with a great little word – they call it Technocrats. How about bankers? Bankers have taken over Italy. Bankers have taken over Greece. You may have heard me say this but I'll say it again and I'll continue to say it again.

Here we have just gotten over this holiday season, the celebration of Jesus Christ, It's more about going to Walmart or crashing down doors on Black Friday to get a loss-leader item or buying a bunch of crap that you don't need to put under an artificial Christmas tree. When you think about the Prince of Peace, when's the only time he became violent? It was when he picked up a whip and drove the moneychangers out of the temple? The moneychangers have taken over the temples – the temples of Athens, the temples of Rome, the temples of Berlin and the City of London. They've taken over Washington. They've taken over every capital of every major city in the world. So where's it going? It's very simple to see where it's going. It's called class warfare.

[...]

Daily Bell: How about the CFTC? Are they doing their job of protection and prosecution?

Gerald Celente: Well who's the head of the CFTC, Gary Gensler? He was one of the lieutenants for Jon 'the Don' Corzine when Corzine was head of the Goldman Sachs gang, before he became senator of New Jersey. You get it?

Who's Obama's Chief of Staff? Bill Daley, from that wonderful Daley machine in Chicago. Where did he come from? Oh, vice chairman of Morgan Chase. Who was Bush's treasury secretary? Oh, Henry 'Frankenstein' Paulson. Where was he from? He began as the CEO of Goldman Sachs after Jon 'the Don' Corzine left. This is the guy who created TAARP and came up with the BS line of 'too big to fail.' Him? Yeah, that's right.

And who's the guy under Clinton that was treasury aecretary who put into process the deregulation of the financial industry and the ultimate killing of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented commercial banks becoming investment banks? Investment banks! What a bunch of baloney that is. Casinos that gamble, and we have to pay them now when they make bad bets. That couldn't be Robert Rubin, could it, the former co-chair of Goldman Sachs? And who's the guy now that they just put on the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi? Where was he from? Didn't he run the European division of Goldman Sachs? And wait a minute now ... what's this guy in Italy now, Mario 'Three-card Monte'? Wasn't he an international advisor for Goldman Sachs?

The moneychangers are taking over the temple; you don't have to go very far to look. It's right there in front of everybody's eyes and no one will call a spade a spade. The Rothschilds would be jealous to see what the Goldman Sachs gang, the JP Morgan Chase criminal operation, the Citigroup crooks, the Deutsche Bank bandits and the rest have pulled off.

Andre: Stort sett samme budskap, men mer politisk korrekt språkføring fra Michael Hudson:

Europe’s Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy

The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum. Bank strategists learned not to risk submitting their plans to democratic vote after Icelanders twice refused in 2010-11 to approve their government’s capitulation to pay Britain and the Netherlands for losses run up by badly regulated Icelandic banks operating abroad. Lacking such a referendum, mass demonstrations were the only way for Greek voters to register their opposition to the €50 billion in privatization sell-offs demanded by the European Central Bank (ECB) in autumn 2011.

The problem is that Greece lacks the ready money to redeem its debts and pay the interest charges. The ECB is demanding that it sell off public assets – land, water and sewer systems, ports and other assets in the public domain, and also cut back pensions and other payments to its population. The “bottom 99%” understandably are angry to be informed that the wealthiest layer of the population is largely responsible for the budget shortfall by stashing away a reported €45 billion of funds stashed away in Swiss banks alone. The idea of normal wage-earners being obliged to forfeit their pensions to pay for tax evaders – and for the general un-taxing of wealth since the regime of the colonels – makes most people understandably angry. For the ECB, EU and IMF “troika” to say that whatever the wealthy take, steal or evade paying must be made up by the population at large is not a politically neutral position. It comes down hard on the side of wealth that has been unfairly taken.

A democratic tax policy would reinstate progressive taxation on income and property, and would enforce its collection – with penalties for evasion. Ever since the 19th century, democratic reformers have sought to free economies from waste, corruption and “unearned income.” But the ECB “troika” is imposing a regressive tax – one that can be imposed only by turning government policy-making over to a set of unelected “technocrats.”

To call the administrators of so anti-democratic a policy “technocrats” seems to be a cynical scientific-sounding euphemism for financial lobbyists or bureaucrats deemed suitably tunnel-visioned to act as useful idiots on behalf of their sponsors. Their ideology is the same austerity philosophy that the IMF imposed on Third World debtors from the 1960s through the 1980s. Claiming to stabilize the balance of payments while introducing free markets, these officials sold off export sectors and basic infrastructure to creditor-nation buyers. The effect was to drive austerity-ridden economies even deeper into debt – to foreign bankers and their own domestic oligarchies.

Tredje og siste, en advarsel fra George Soros:

[Soros recently] offered [Newsweek] a word of warning: a period of “evil” is coming to the western world.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros goes on to compare the current state of the western world with what the Soviet Union was facing as communism crumbled. Although he would think that history would have taught the globe a thing or two about noticing trends, Soros says that, despite past events providing a perfect example of what is to come, the end of an empire seems imminent.

“The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening,” adds Soros.

Soros goes on to say that as the crisis in the Eurozone only worsens, the American financial system will continue to be hit hard. On the way to a full-blown collapse, he cautions, Americans should expect society to alter accordingly. Riots will hit the streets, says Soros, and as a result, “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

The recent adoption of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 and the proposed Enemy Expatriation Act, if approved, have already very well paved the way for such a society. Under the NDAA, the US government is allowed to indefinitely detain and torture American citizens suspected of terror crimes without ever bringing them to trial.

Bonus: Noen tanker om droner, fra John Robb:

The Future of Warfare:

[...] an autonomous aircraft/drone that has a full weapons bay (4,500 lbs). Say that word again: autonomous. That's the breakthrough feature. This also means:

It can make its own "kill decision."

[...]

However, I'm much more worried about their ability to automate repression, particularly if combined with software bots that sift/sort/monitor all of your data 24x7x365 (already going on).

Drone Diplomacy: Comply or Die

Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability -- wouldn't that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).

Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

If they don't do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system).

Drone Swarms are Here: 1 Minute to Midnight?

God helg. Sov godt.

JODI status

Pirket litt rundt hos JODI.

TOD hadde en post om divergensen mellom EIA og JODI sine oljeproduksjonstall i fjor. Status den gangen var at JODI fikk inn rapporter fra 90 land, som sto for ca 90% av verdens oljeproduksjon. Kjernen i posten var denne grafen:

Som vi ser ut gjør ikke de manglende landene noen forskjell hva retningen på utviklingen angår: de er mange men små, så resultatet er relativt konstant. (Mistenker vel at EIA også gjetter en del, og at det ikke har noe å si i den store sammenhengen. Usikkerheten i disse tallene er stor uansett.)

Her er JODI sine mest oppdaterte data. "Olje" (som iflg manualen (pdf) inkluderer kondensat) i blått, Liquefied Petroleum Gas i orange (propan og butan). Det siste datapunktet er november 2011, men mange land, deriblant Kina og Kuwait, er listet med 0 i produksjon, noe som definitvt ikke stemmer. (Det er mange andre tvilsomme 0'er i datasettet også; en øvelse for en regnversdag å bytte dem ut med gjennomsnittstall eller EIA-tall, men jeg tror ikke det har noe særlig å si, litt for nivået sikkert, men ikke for formen på kurven.) Oktober ser ut til å våre siste relativt komplette måneden. Likevel...

Betyr dette at EIA er helt på bærtur? La oss ta en titt på JODIs kategori "Total Products":

Total oil includes all oil products: the five main product groups described above (LPG, Gasoline, Kerosene, Gas/diesel Oil and Heavy Fuel Oil) but also all the products which were not identified separately : refinery gas, ethane, naphtha, gasoline type jet fuel, petroleum coke, white spirit & SBP, paraffin waxes, bitumen, lubricants and other products.

(fra manualen)

Det ser ut til at denne kategorien også inkluderer biodrivstoff, ikke direkte, men innrapportert som "gasoline"; etanol iaf har jo en misjon som tilsetningsstoff til bensin, så det går vel ikke an å klage på. Dette burde være ganske likt EIAs samlekategori "All Liquids":

Her er formen mye likere EIA-grafen.

Occupy Wall Street

Endelig ser det ut til at amerikanerne, vel noen av dem i alle fall noen av dem, har skjønt tegninga!

"Occupy"-bevegelsen ser ut til å ha fått fotfeste. Foreløpig synes jeg de ser for naive, planløse ut; men det er et skritt i riktig retning.


En ikke helt uviktig flis å spikke er at det er ikke den øverste 1% som er problemet, men den øverste promillen.

An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1% (anonym, postet av sosiologi-professor G. William Domhoff)

The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well

...

The higher we go up into the top 0.5% the more likely it is that their wealth is in some way tied to the investment industry and borrowed money than from personally selling goods or services or labor as do most in the bottom 99.5%. They are much more likely to have built their net worth from stock options and capital gains in stocks and real estate and private business sales, not from income which is taxed at a much higher rate. These opportunities are largely unavailable to the bottom 99.5%.

Recently, I spoke with a younger client who retired from a major investment bank in her early thirties, net worth around $8M. We can estimate that she had to earn somewhere around twice that, or $14M-$16M, in order to keep $8M after taxes and live well along the way, an impressive accomplishment by such an early age. Since I knew she held a critical view of investment banking, I asked if her colleagues talked about or understood how much damage was created in the broader economy from their activities. Her answer was that no one talks about it in public but almost all understood and were unbelievably cynical, hoping to exit the system when they became rich enough.

Folks in the top 0.1% come from many backgrounds but it's infrequent to meet one whose wealth wasn't acquired through direct or indirect participation in the financial and banking industries.

(min utheving -- takk til Iaato på TOD for peker)

Lou Reed + Metallica = Tool?

Har jeg nevnt at jeg er Lou Reed-fan?

Han har nå spilt inn albumet Lulu sammen med Metallica, slippes i slutten av måneden, men alle sanger er streambare fra nettsiden Lou Reed & Metallica.

Har bare hørt Frustration så langt (pga mobilt "bredbånd"), men det høres godt ut! Dog ikke for sarte sjeler... Eller for den saks skyld store deler av Metallica-fansen, vil jeg tro... (fnis) Fra Wikipedia:

German Metal Hammer rated the album with four out of seven stars. The magazine's reaction to the album was mixed. According to the review, Lou Reed and Metallica have created an avant-garde-theatrialic soundtrack which is not easy to listen to and rather recommendable for Lou Reed fans, Metallica fans "will mostly ignore Lulu - and listen to Master of Puppets".

Det er ikke ofte jeg venter på at en plate skal komme ut, men det gjør jeg nå...

Takk til Dangerous Minds som gjorde meg oppmerksom på plata. Hmm Frustration-videoen de postet er sporløst forsvunnet, kan de ha fått dask på lanken tro...?

Hva sa Hubbert egentlig?

Stuart Staniford hadde en post vedr asymmetrisk produksjonskurve for USA forrige dagen. Jeg sendte inn denne kommentaren:

According to Ivanhoe, in his article King Hubbert - Updated(PDF!), Hubbert himself wrote:

"This complete cycle has only the following essential properties: The production rate begins at zero, increases exponentially during the early period of development, and then slows down, passes through one or more principal maxima, and finally declines negative exponentially to zero. There is no necessity that the curve P as a function of t, have a single maximum or that it be symmetrical. In fact, the smaller the region, the more irregular in shape is the curve likely to be. On the other hand, for large areas such as the United States or the world, the annual production curve results from the superposition of the production from thousands of separate fields. In such cases, the irregularities of small areas tend to cancel one another and the composite curve becomes a smooth curve with only a single practical maximum. However, there is no theoretical necessity that this curve by symmetrical. Whether it is or is not will have to be determined by the data themselves." (my emphasis)

Hubbert seems to have drawn symmetrical curves out of expediency; I have read anecdotes by people claiming to have known him that he could get rather irate when people ascribed to him the notion that the curve would necessarily be symmetrical.

Ivanhoe refererer:

Hubbert, M. King, 1980; Techniques of prediction as applied to the production of oil & gas; in Oil & Gas Supply Modeling, Ed. S.I. Gass; Proceedings of a symposium held at the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C., June 18-20, 1980; Report N.B.S. Special Publication #631, May, 1982, p. 16-141. (Extensive summaries of all of MKH’s earlier papers.)

Men så, rett etterpå, leser jeg på Energy Bulletin A note on Hubbert’s hypotheses and techniques (EB, Pierre-Noël Giraud) at

1. Hubbert’s thesis

Hubbert’s thesis can be formulated as follows: “The annual production over time of a mineral resource is bound, for purely geological reasons, to follow a bell-shaped symmetrical curve. The annual production therefore reaches a ‘peak’ when half of the reserves have been produced, then it declines while the remaining half of reserves, more expensive to exploit, is being depleted”.
[figure omitted]
2. Hubbert’s basic assumptions

According to Hubbert’s papers, and papers by his partisans, the three underlying assumptions of the Hubbert’s thesis are:


Assumption 1: The curve: (cumulative discoveries) = f (cumulative exploration effort) is a pure logistic curve. (Fig 2)
[figure omitted]
Assumption 2: Exploration effort is constant over time.

Assumption 3: The time-lag between discovery and production is constant.

If these three assumptions are accepted, then Hubbert’s thesis is logically true.

As the exploration effort over time is constant, the above pure logistic curve
(cumulative discoveries) = f ( cumulative exploration effort) can be rewritten as a second pure logistic curve: (cumulative discoveries) = f ( time).

Thus, the rate of discovery is the derivative of this pure logistic curve of cumulative discoveries over time, which is a symmetrical bell curve. As for the rate of production, it is obtained by merely translating the rate of discovery by the constant time-lag between discovery and production, equally a symmetrical bell curve. Q.E.D.

Arrgh. Skal jeg bli nødt til å selv pløye gjennom alt Hubbert skrev for å finne ut hva han egentlig sa??? Det er åpenbart at enten Ivanhoe eller Giraud har misforstått og/eller over/feiltolket her.

...og jeg skal spise Felleskjøpet-sixpencen min dersom det er Ivanhoe. For det første, Ivanhoe gir faktiske Hubbert-referanser og sitater. For det andre, Giraud sier "according to Hubbert's papers, and papers by his partisans" -- hvem er Hubbert-partisan her, om ikke Ivanhoe??? Og det er ikke akkurat nøytral språkføring av Giraud her, heller. Girauds stykke fremstår både stilistisk og innholdsmessig som et "straw man"-argument; et rent sverteforsøk mot Hubbert.

Når det er sagt... At Hubbert presenterte matte som gir symmetriske kurver, er utvilsomt. Om det var det eneste han la fram skal jeg ikke ha sagt; men det er intellektuellt uærlig (eventuelt innmari dårlig forskning) å kun fokusere på matten og ignorere at forfatteren påpeker at "dette er en grov forenkling av virkeligheten, det er ikke slik at kurven nødvendigvis er symmetrisk, så ta det med en klype salt", og så bombastisk hevde at forfatteren tok feil fordi virkelighetens kurver ikke er symmetriske.

Nei, det er ikke lett å være profet. Marx' utbrudd om sine tilhengere virker á propos: "Hvis dette er Marxisme, så er ikke jeg Marxist".

Commodities vs US aksjer, oppdatering

Her er en festlig graf fra CRB (linken har interaktiv versjon som oppdateres daglig (sen kveld norsk tid), min versjon her er et screenshot fra 8de juni, altså á jour 7de juni etter stengetid; klikk for større versjon):

Grafen viser altså prosentvis forandring i CRBs Continuous Commodity Index (med en vertikal strek for hver dag, hvor overkanten viser dagens høyeste punkt og underkanten dagens laveste pkt, og en horisontal tapp på venstre side som viser åpningsnivået og en på høyre som viser sluttnivået), pluss Nasdaq i gusjegrønt, S&P 500 i rødt og Dow Jones i blått (kun sluttnivåer for akjeindeksene). Første dag er 11te oktober 2010 (som altså er lik 0% forandring for alle fire).

Inntrykket jeg får av å studere denne grafen er at noe forandret seg i midten av april i år. Fram til det går CCI-indeksen stort sett i takt med aksjeindeksene (hvorfor? Noen teorier/faktorer: forandringer i valutakurser, flokkmentalitet blant markedsaktører, politiske stimuli som påvirker alle markeder i samme retning samtidig); så går CCI sidelengs et par uker mens aksjeindeksene skyter i været; så, fra slutten av april, går aksjekursene litt ned mens CCI stuper, og på et tidspunkt, nærmere bestemt 12te mai, er under samtlige aksjeindekser. Så beveget de seg mer eller mindre i takt igjen fram til begynnelsen av juni; men den siste uken har CCI beveget seg sidelengs mens aksjer har falt bratt.

Vel... det var en tilsvarende divergens fra aksjenes topp medio februar til CCIs topp tidlig mars; CCI tok deretter et stup og kom slik tilbake i "takt". Etter mottoet "Det er IKKE anderledes denne gangen" må vi anta at det samme kommer til å skje nå: etter noen uker divergens, så hopper de tilbake i takt, enten vet at CCI stuper etter, eller ved at aksjeindeksene reverserer tapene.

Men, som tidligere sagt, jeg satser ikke penger på dette... jeg følger med fordi jeg tror det kan være hint å plukke opp her mht hvor verdensøkonomien er på vei hen.

Konsekvent sterkere prisvekst for commodities enn for aksjer antar jeg er et klart signal om at vi bumper inn i vekstens grenser. Eller, kanskje heller, at det er gått opp for finanselitens kollektive bevissthet at vi bumper mot samme.

En litt lengre tidshorisont er kanskje nødvendig -- her er en månedlig versjon av historien, samme kilde som ovenfor:

(Yo, dig the .com bubble, y'all!)

Jevnt og trutt...

Desalinering, fattigdom og hvete

... hva koster desalinering nå for tiden? Vi holder oss til Australia i første omgang. I følge New York Times ligger kostnaden der et sted mellom 1 og 2 dollar per kubikkmeter:

Mr. Young of the Water Services Association said desalination in Australia costs $1.75 to $2 per cubic meter, including the costs of construction, clean energy and production. The prices are probably the world’s highest, said Mr. Pankratz of the International Desalination Association, adding that desalination was cheaper in countries with less strict environmental standards. He said the cost at a typical new plant in the world today would be about $1 per cubic meter.

(Arid Australia Sips Seawater, but at a Cost; NYT, juli 2010)

Dette må vel tolkes dithen at kostnaden for bygging og drift med kullkraft-strøm (Australias hovedkilde) og uten å gjøre noe særlig for å beskytte miljøet mot det konsentrerte saltvannet som er et biprodukt er ca 1 dollar, mens å produsere med fornybar energi og ansvarlig håndtering av avfall opp mot dobler prisen.

Fra CSIRO (den australske offentlige vitenskapsorganisasjonen) finner vi Desalination in Australia (Hoang et al, februar 2009, PDF!). Der står det mye interessant, blant annet at

The product water cost per kL is mostly in the range of less than $1.25 for potable water and $1.25-$2.00 for industrial water. The higher cost for industrial water can probably be attributed to the lower plant capacity and lack of economy of scale. In addition, the cost of supply to industrial customers is generally higher as a result of the shorter capital recovery period for industrial projects compared with municipal projects.

(s. 5)

The survey data show that the average energy consumption is 3-3.7 kWh/kL for sea water RO, 0.7-1 kWh/kL for brackish water and 1.2 kWh/kL for industrial effluent.

(s. 9)

og så har de denne fine tabellen over internasjonale kostnader:

(Hva er det israelerne gjør? Are they just that good?)

Om det er US eller Aus dollar spiller liten rolle for vårt formål, kursene er iflg Norges Bank nå hhv ca 5,5 og 5,8 kroner, vi runder med god samvittighet opp til 6; og med et stadion-estimat på 1$ per kubikkmeter/kiloLiter ender vi opp med 6 tidels øre pr liter for avsalting.

Så for australiere, som er rike i global sammenheng, er kostnaden nærmest neglisjerbar: 200 liter per pers per dag koster ikke mer enn 1 krone og 20 øre (per person og dag).

Det ser nokså annerledes ut for verdens fattige. I følge o store Wikipedia, så

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than US $1.25 (PPP) per day, and moderate poverty as less than $2 a day (but note that a person or family with access to subsistence resources, e.g. subsistence farmers, may have a low cash income without a correspondingly low standard of living - they are not living "on" their cash income but using it as a top up). It estimates that "in 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day."

(Jeg må jo si at jeg stiller spørsmålstegn ved å gjøre et sånt estimat uten å prøve å sette en pengeverdi på utbyttet fra subsistence farming, men men)

Og fra FAO:

A good yield of wheat under irrigation is 4 to 6 ton/ha (12 to 15 percent moisture). The water utilization efficiency for harvested yield (Ey) for grain is about 0.8 to 1.0 kg/m³.

(Wheat - versjon 2002)

og også

Under irrigation a good commercial grain yield is 6 to 9 ton/ha (10 to 13 percent moisture). The water utilization efficiency for harvested yield (Ey) for grain varies then between 0.8 and 1.6 kg/m³.

(Crop Water Information: Wheat)

Ser ut til å være to forskjellige versjoner av samme artikkel; den første er eksplisitt Last update: 16 October 2002, mens den andre sier bare "Copyright FAO 2011" -- men det er bare en arv fra nettside-templaten, og sier ingenting om når artikkelen ble skrevet. Men den siste er nok nyere. Fra 1,0 til 1,6 kg/kl maks "vannavkastning" er ganske enormt! Og det er bevegelsen fra 4-6 til 6-9 tonn/ha også. Men så er formuleringen i den første "a good yield of wheat", mens den andre er "a good commercial grain yield" (min utheving), så det er mulig at det er en epler-og-appelsiner -- sammenligning her: at den første snakker om hva som er vanlig på verdensbasis, den andre snakker om hva de største industridyrkerne oppnår. All den tid FAO ikke oppgir noen middel- eller medianverdi eller sier noe mer kan vi bare gjette.

Og siden vi først er i gang med stadionestimater så stadionestimerer vi at det går med en kubikkmeter vann til ett kilo hvete.

Dersom alt dette vannet skulle bringes til veie ved desalinering -- si hvis vi ville dyrke hvete i ørkenen i Australia (ja det høres perverst ut, men jeg har i vinter og vår kunnet kjøpe billige poteter fra Saudi Arabia(!) i Norge (!!!)) --
så ville desalineringskostnaden utgjøre ca 6 kr/kg.

Dette er direkte sammenlignbart med prisen for en kilo hvetemel, en detail, i Norge i dag.

Hvis vi antar at produksjonskostnaden er ca. en fjerdedel av butikkprisen, så innebærer det en kostnadsøkning på 300% eller deromkring.

Og de som lever på 2 dollar dagen som ikke er sjølvergingsbønder vil være ettertrykkelig priset ut av markedet.