The Razor

This is the kind of thing that stokes my skepticism of trendy science:

FORECASTS of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. We could be about to enter one or even two decades of cooler temperatures, according to one of the world’s top climate modellers….

Latif predicts that in the next few years a natural cooling trend will dominate the warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes in the atmosphere and ocean currents in the North Atlantic, known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO).

Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, Latif said the NAO was probably responsible for some of the strong warming seen around the globe in the past three decades. “But how much? The jury is still out,” he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a phase that will cool the planet.

Oh and that alarming melting of ice in Antarctica? “(P)artly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming.”

As an amateur scientist and historian, I am always amazed when the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming is compared to theories that have stood the test of time and experiment like the Theory of Evolution. This is like comparing the latest best seller by a first time novelist to Joyce or Shakespeare. Being popular does not make it right – and the lemming-like behavior of scientists who are blindly following the “consensus” herd off the cliff should remember what’s in store for them at the bottom.

U2’s the Edge owns 156 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains and plans to build five 10,000 sq ft mansions on his property. “These homes will be some of the most environmentally sensitive ever designed in Malibu — or anywhere in the world,” the guitarist, whose real name is David Evans, said in a prepared statement released to the press. This being America even if it is a post-Kelo America, property rights should trump p***ing off the locals which The Edge’s plan seems to be doing.

“It is going to look nice to the human eye but at what cost?” said surf shop owner and City Councilman Jefferson Wagner. “When is enough enough?”

Surf-dude, enough is enough when you own the property you are whining about – unless you want someone like me to violate your property rights by convincing the council to turn your shop into something truly useful, like a Wawa.

As a property owner myself I support the Edge’s right to do whatever the heck he wants to with that 156 acres. If he wants to clear-cut it and turn it into a parking lot, that it is his right. Ditto with the Surf-dude councilman. If he wants to sell wannabees boards that they aren’t qualified to ride, then that’s his business – not mine.

But one difference between the Edge and me is that I don’t claim to be green. He’s considered by the MSM to be an environmentalist yet I’m considered to belong to a group that would drop-kick the Lorax into a chipper-shredder.

Funny thing is that I’m currently looking at properties with acreage in rural North Carolina with the intent on protecting it from development. In fact the Wife just checked out 75 acres along a river with old growth timber on it. Unfortunately it was also infested with hippies and Rainbow People-types. The owner was charging top dollar for the property but insisted that in any contract he was going to write a clause that allowed him access to a cave on the property anytime he wanted, and that the hippies would be allowed to continue to “gather” on the property.

The Wife laughed heartily at that and then mentioned that the Kid and I planned to set up a shooting range. The owner smiled a bit wanly, evidently imagining me running my very own hippy hunting reserve.

I don’t care about my carbon footprint and evidently The Edge doesn’t care about his either. Supporting each of five 10,000 square foot mansions takes a lot of carbon to build and maintain. I do care about wilderness, preserving what remains and returning land that has fallen out of use by Man to the wild. I look at the blocks of empty lots and vacant buildings that blight the urban landscape, and imagine fencing the area off with razor wire, removing the concrete and asphalt, planting trees and adding a pack of wolves and a herd of deer. But I don’t have the money for my crazy “green” ideas like the Edge does.

Meanwhile I live in a 1,200 square foot home. My Wife and I are adherents of the Not So Big House philosophy which is the anti-thesis of current American housing culture. In place of a large McMansions on postage stamp piece of land our ideal is a small cozy cottage on a large tract of land. We have considered how much house we really needed and decided that the answer was under 2,000 sq. ft.

Does the Edge need 10,000 square feet? That is just under a quarter of an acre, and over 4x the average home size in the USA. According to Wikipedia, Edge has a wife and two children. Does each need the equivalent square footage of the average American house? More importantly does he need to offer such mansions to 4 other families?

The price of the lots alone are $7.5 million, and selling all four would net him $30 million – 3 1/2 times the original cost of the entire 156 acre parcel. The project would require the removal of 70,000 cubic yards of earth and the grading of a road up the steep hillsides.

Edge claims that the properties will be “environmentally sensitive” in terms of blending into the landscape and using state of the art power and water conservation technologies. But reducing the environmental damage caused by building a single 10,000 sq. ft. house doesn’t eliminate the damage such construction causes in the first place, not to mention the ongoing damage caused by the maintenance of such a behemoth.

So what ego requires 10,000 square foot? The Edge’s ego and no doubt his pocket book; it has nothing to do with being green – and that’s hypocrisy in my book.

This Bloomberg article point out something that I haven’t come across before regarding oil production:

``The divisions arise in OPEC because what countries need and want varies,’’ said Gareth Lewis-Davies, an oil analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Group Ltd. in London. ``The Saudis are playing a long-term political game. Other countries have higher costs.’’

Saudi Arabia needs oil prices of less than $30 a barrel to balance its government budget, according to Merrill Lynch & Co. estimates. The United Arab Emirates requires $40 a barrel and Qatar $55.

Iran, with double the population of Saudi Arabia, has a breakeven point of about $100 a barrel, according to Edward Morse, managing director and chief economist at Louis Capital Markets LP in New York. In Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez’s government is spending oil revenue on social programs, the figure is about $120, he said.

Today oil is trading at $69 a barrel, down 52% from its high this past July. Given that the price is dropping at the same time an announcement is expected from OPEC cutting production by 2.5 million bbls/day – the output of Kuwait, it’s clear that investors believe that the recession in the US and oil consuming nations will boost supplies more than OPEC can cut them. It also shows an expectation that the OPEC nations will cheat, producing more than their OPEC quotas in an attempt to sell as much oil they can before the price falls even further. This is the exact opposite of the situation this past summer where rising prices made it lucrative for nations to pump as little as they could in order to sell oil later at higher prices.

By pointing out different production costs between OPEC nations the Bloomberg article explains the behavior the individual OPEC states. Saudi Arabia has been one of the few OPEC nations to recognize the long term costs of high oil prices. They show a heroin dealer’s acumen when it comes to addiction: make your product too expensive and you increase the incentive of your junkies to quit. Iran and Venezuela lack that knowledge – and given that their production costs are up to 4x that of the Saudi’s it’s clear why.

UPDATE: Here’s an article at the Economist with slightly different figures but roughly the same idea.

In May I wrote the following:

In January 2007 oil was at $50 barrel; in May 2007 it was at $60. Today, May 21, it traded at $134. So in a period of 1 year it the price of oil has more than doubled. In 16 months it has nearly tripled.

When prices rise quickly in a very short time you are in a bubble. It doesn’t matter whether you are talking about commodities, internet stocks, or tulips. When you have the feeling that you are on a rocket and the only way to go is up, then you are actually standing on the surface of a bubble. And bubbles always burst.

I even went so far as to predict that the oil bubble would burst the last week of July. As far as an educated guess goes, I wasn’t that far off the mark. Oil peaked on July 11. Oil is trading as I write, October 10, 2008 at $77.32 - a 47% decline from it’s high.

What happened? Several things. First demand slackened and the dollar strengthened. These two factors caused speculators to realize that the downside of oil was greater than the upside. As money started to flow out of the commodity, investors expecting the price to rise were forced to cover their positions. This lead to the slow deflation of the bubble until the last weeks of September.

For the last weeks panic has gripped the stock market as irrational exhuberance switched to fear caused by the credit crisis. Now everyone is expecting a deep recession which will caused demand for oil to plummet. What had been a perfect storm supporting the these of “peak oil” has changed into a “perfect storm” where the value of oil has collapsed.

As a contrarian by nature, I believe that the panic occurring in the market is ignoring the fundamentals. If I gambled, I would be plowing money into the market, buying stock in companies with solid fundamentals that have been caught up in the, I believe the economic term is “hoopla”. As for Oil, OPEC is going to cut supply, but the organization has a terrible track record in stabilizing prices so I don’t expect the official cut to do much (or stop countries from selling on the side to make as much money as possible before the oil price falls even further). Russia and Venezuela, two countries that have ridden high on the boom in oil prices will be hit the hardest.

So what does this prove? It shows that for every boom there is a bust, that economic gravity still exists. There is no need for exotic explanations like “peak oil”. I doubt we will be hearing that term much more over the next few months.

File this one under “D” for “Duh…”

According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad. The carbon emissions from such flights can swamp the green savings made at home, the researchers claim.

Stewart Barr, of Exeter University, who led the research, said: “Green living is largely something of a myth. There is this middle class environmentalism where being green is part of the desired image. But another part of the desired image is to fly off skiing twice a year. And the carbon savings they make by not driving their kids to school will be obliterated by the pollution from their flights.”

Some people even said they deserved such flights as a reward for their green efforts, he added.

Hattip: The Deceiver

I think stories like this are going to become increasingly common.

He knows the futuristic towers are pumping clean electricity into the grid, knows they have been largely embraced by his community.

But Yancey hates them.

He hates the sight and he hates the sound. He says they disrupt his sleep, invade his house, his consciousness. He can’t stand the gigantic flickering shadows the blades cast at certain points in the day.

But what this brawny 48-year-old farmer’s son hates most about the windmills is that his father, who owns much of the property, signed a deal with the wind company to allow seven turbines on Yancey land.

“I was sold out by my own father,” he sputters.

Since we’re thinking about moving to a rural area, we’ll have to keep projects like this in mind. I’d rather live near a nuclear power plant than acres of these things.

... is a hundred footer.

Let’s not forget: Gore made similar claims about the environmental benefits of the solar panels and other “green” additions he made to his 10,000 square foot home in Belle Meade, a cushy neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee. The environmental savings promised from his “investments” failed to produce the results that he touted. In fact, his “energy efficient” renovations to his home actually INCREASED his electrical consumption by 10% rather than producing the promised reductions. Ultimately, Gore’s water-based excursions on his giant houseboat may prove more environmentally friendly than his fleet of limos, his private jets or his mansion. Perhaps the B.S. One will never live up to its nickname, but the jet ski on the boat is clearly powered by something other than solar or bio-diesel.

I’ve never bought that line, and it’s obvious that the aphorism doesn’t apply in Science either. Case in point: scientists who dissent “with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community.”

Source: American Physical Society

Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the “global warming” of the past 50 years and would cause further rapid warming. However, global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001. The present analysis suggests that the failure of the IPCC’s models to predict this and many other climatic phenomena arises from defects in its evaluation of the three factors whose product is climate sensitivity:

1. Radiative forcing ΔF;
2. The no-feedbacks climate sensitivity parameter κ; and
3. The feedback multiplier ƒ.

Some reasons why the IPCC’s estimates may be excessive and unsafe are explained. More importantly, the conclusion is that, perhaps, there is no “climate crisis”, and that currently-fashionable efforts by governments to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions are pointless, may be ill-conceived, and could even be harmful.

The highest form of patriotism is serving your nation. The highest form of Science is keeping an open mind.

Steven Den Beste provides an update of his scepticism of alternative energy in this update to his USS Clueless work...

The problems facing “alternate energy” are fundamental, deep, and are show-stoppers. They are not things that will be surmounted by one lone incremental improvement in one small area, announced breathlessly by a startup which is trying to drum up funding.

The way you can tell that a fan of “alternate energy” is a religious cultist is to ask them this question: If your preferred alternate source of energy is practical, why isn’t it already in use?

Why not? Because of The Conspiracy™. The big oil companies don’t want it to happen, and have been suppressing all this live-saving green people’s energy all this time for their own nefarious purposes.

As soon as you hear any reference to The Conspiracy™, you know you’re talking to someone who is living in a morality play. That isn’t engineering any more, that’s religion. And while religion is an important part of many people’s lives, it has no place in engineering discussions.

Hattip: Dean Esmay

Like most Americans I’m concerned about high fuel prices. I’m also worried about America’s energy dependence on Middle Eastern regimes and nutcases like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. I’m a big Excel geek too. Of all the software tools that I’ve used for fun and my job, I like Excel the best. So it should come as no surprise that I’ve turned to it to help make sense of the oil crunch.

In the short term, what can we do to lower oil consumption? In this spreadsheet (it has a simple macro but I made it) I lay out our current consumption along with three scenarios that examines the impact driving more fuel efficient cars and driving less have on gasoline and oil supplies. To do this I rely upon the following:

Here’s what I know:
• The number of gallons of gasoline refined from a barrel of crude in the USA.
• The current gallons of gasoline used per day in the USA.
• The average MPG for all US cars and light trucks.
• The US population.
• Number of new cars sold in the USA in 2007.
• Number of cars & light trucks registered in the US in 2006
• Number of licensed drivers
• Age structure of the American fleet (2001 estimate)

These variables allow me to calculate the following:
• The number of barrels of crude consumed in the USA per day for gasoline.
• The number of miles driven per day per licensed driver.

What I don’t know:
•2008 fleet mpg (assumed to be 17.1 mpg)
•Future consumption
•Future demand growth
•Future production

Because I don’t know the future, I am limiting the scope to the current time (for the less driving scenario) and the next two years (allowing me to use the age structure of the US car and light truck fleet.)

Assumptions
• No diesel or heavy truck statistics. The focus is only on gasoline usage.
• Flat world wide production (short term).
• Flat worldwide demand (short term).
• No disruption of oil supplies.
• No change in age structure of American fleet since 2001.
• Fleet MPG adjusted to EPA’s 2008 method (decreases historical values by 17.4%)
• I’ve used the harmonic mean to calculate the fleet average. This is the same function used by the EPA.

These are all big assumptions, but I need to make them to grasp our situation. At the very least I would expect to get a decent approximation of the actual numbers – say a variance of +/-25% for any given statistic.

So what do we learn by playing with the numbers?

It should come as no surprise that driving less has the greatest impact on consumption since no gasoline is expended. The problem is that people are already driving an efficient routes from point A-B because longer routes take more time, and people have been trying to save time since cars became a necessity. Perhaps I should add this as an assumption, but I don’t see people taking roundabout ways while running errands or commutting. But there must be at least a few percentage points in inefficiency or “slack” built into our daily driving. This assumption is based on the belief that everyone is not a delivery or taxi driver who knows the most efficient routes from point A-B.

If we cut 5% from the per capita mileage, we cut our gasoline usage by 5%. However things don’t move 5% closer. So how can we save that 5%? Based on what we know we find the average daily driving for licensed drivers is 32.9 miles. 5% of that is 1.6 miles/day or roughly 12 miles/week.

Is this realistic? 1.6 miles a day is roughly 30 minutes of walking or 10 minutes of biking. Add in mass transit and more efficient trip planning and I would estimate that it is realistic with the following caveats.

First it’s easy to imagine everyone walking or riding bicycles during nice weather, but imagine riding a bike in the rain. If we stay at home on a rainy Tuesday we can’t drive more on a sunny Wednesday to make up for the lost time without conserving Tuesday’s 5% on top of Wednesday’s.  Second we could capture some wasted mileage through better routing and trip planning mentioned above. Third, 41.5 million Americans have gym memberships. Assuming that most of those are licensed drivers, there is at least a percentage point or two of slack that could be gained by substituting walking or bicycling for treadmills and stair machines. Finally health care professionals recommend the benefits of walking or bicycling in the community, but do their communities support increased pedestrian activity? In my neighborhood there aren’t sidewalks along the major streets, forcing people to walk on the shoulder of roads where traffic zips by at 50 MPH, and many streetlights lack crosswalks. And I live in the heart of suburbia. Infrastructure changes would therefore be required.

The fastest way to cut that 5% would be for companies to allow those who can to do so to telecommute one day a week. While the majority of the workforce would not be able to do this, telecommuting would allow some to save 20% of their commute. As firms are recognizing that it can earn them some “green” credentials, it may become more common; however only a minority of the workforce works at a job where this is physically feasible let alone tolerated.

So what does that 5% in savings get us? We drop from 388.6 million gallons of gasoline per day to 369.7 million. That’s a savings of about 900,000 barrels of crude used domestically, or 1.1% of the world total. Given the fluctuation of supply and demand globally, a percent drop in demand would have little impact on prices.

So based on our numbers so far, a 5% cut in gasoline consumption would have little affect on world crude oil prices. Could we do better with a cut of 10%? Of course, but lopping off 3.2 miles a day means that we would have to make up for that with an hour of walking or 20 minutes of biking. 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We’d be a much fitter nation as a result, but I just don’t think there is enough impetus for Americans to cut back that much. Perhaps it will be there if and when gasoline hits $6/gallon, but at this time I just don’t think it is realistic.

What about driving more fuel efficient cars? Since we know the age profile of vehicles on the road today we can estimate the impact of purchasing more fuel efficient cars over the next two years. Because vehicles 2 years old or less constitute less than 14% of all cars on the road, it takes time for their fuel efficiency to have much impact on overall gasoline usage. If all vehicles sold over the next two years (30.4 million) averaged 25 mpg, we would use 6% less gasoline in the USA but lower the worldwide demand for crude oil by 1.4%.

Is that 25 mpg average realistic? Unfortunately no. According to FuelEconomy.gov only 21 cars meet or exceed the combined 25 mpg – a small fraction of the hundreds of models sold. The selection of models is limited as well: small cars, family sedans, hatchbacks and station wagons. No pickup trucks or SUV’s, and while some may not need one of those particular models, others do. In addition without delving into production numbers for these vehicles it is doubtful that 15.7 million of them could be supplied. For example as of November 2007 Toyota had sold just over 500,000 of its hybrid Prius in the United States, with predicted sales of 200,000 in 2008.

Given these constraints perhaps a 20 mpg threshhold is more realistic. Unfortunately savings in 2 years would be 2% of US gasoline consumption, which in turn would lower worldwide crude demand by half a percent. There doesn’t seem to be much bang for the buck there.

Does this mean that buying more fuel efficient cars is futile? Of course not. If anything the incremental gains in fuel efficiency of vehicles are longer lasting than any changes in our behavior. If the price of gasoline falls – which it will inevitably do – it will be easier for people to hop into their cars and drive than to walk, bicycle or combine trips. The gains in fuel efficiency for the entire fleet are as hard to erase as they are to accumulate, so there is no reason not to buy the most fuel efficient vehicle you can.

Changing the fleet is where the big gains are found. If we start over the next two years to sell cars averaging 20 mpg, followed in 2012 by cars averaging 22 mpg, in 2016 25 mpg, and in 2018 selling cars with an average of 30 mpg, by 2020 we will have a fleet average of 23 mpg. That fleet would consume 26% less gasoline, lowering global crude demand by 6.1%. Add in a healthy 5% less driving, and the result is cutting gasoline demand in the USA by a third.

Those are significant savings to the pocketbook as well as to our national defense, and if you think that 2020 is distant just remember that it’s as far away as 1996. Unfortunately if we are to switch to the long term benefits we also must revisit our assumptions. Demand for oil will continue growing in Asia for the forseeable future; demand will also grow along with the population in the US.

Will supply grow to meet that demand? The answer depends on whether you believe in peak oil or not, and that question, discussed here, is beyond the scope of this article which focuses on the short (2 year) term. Demand could be affected by plug-in hybrids and electrics like the Chevy Volt and others. While electric cars would constitute an insignificant portion of the fleet during the early part of the next decade, they would reduce demand in our equations by decreasing our pool of licensed drivers. Oil supply could be boosted by political decisions allowing drilling in sites previously ruled off-limits.

What’s the answer? In the short term it is to drive less, walk or bicycle if possible, plan your errands and when it comes time to buy a new car, purchase the most fuel efficient one in its class. Most likely gasoline at $4 gallon is already forcing you to do much of that already. But it took time to get us into this mess and it will take time to get us out of it. What is needed most on our part is determination to help ourselves and the guts to pressure our leaders in goverment.

What they must do is get out of the oil business by stopping oil and gas subsidies on one hand, and opening up drilling in previously untouched areas on the other. But I am not stupid or anti-environment. The government must monitor these efforts closely to make sure that the best safety and environmental standards are applied at each well head, and on each pipeline.

Would setting CAFÉ targets help? I believe that CAFÉ targets work best when gasoline is cheap; when it’s expensive there isn’t a need for them. SUVs and light trucks are languishing on new car lots. Dealers are practically having to give them away, while they can’t keep high MPG cars like the Prius and Honda Civic on their lots. Given that the price of gasoline will eventually fall, it would make sense that the government set the targets now at a time when the car industry has no problem meeting them in anticipation of the time when gas falls. While I’m no fan of excessive government regulation of the market, what CAFÉ targets do is smooth out demand between times when efficient vehicles are in demand with the times they aren’t.

Like we need more… “Are We in the Peak of an Oil Bubble” by Lisa Zyga.

The scientists looked at the data in the context of three different models, and all three models revealed the existence of a “log-periodic power law,” in mathematical terms – in other words, a bubble. In economic terms, the researchers explain, a bubble refers to a situation in which expectations of future price increases cause prices to temporarily rise without justification from fundamental valuation.

Further, the models showed that the bubble is close to a local peak, and we may have even reached the peak already. On the other hand, the researchers noted, this critical peak may also be embedded in a larger-scale bubble, one that could develop in the coming months and years.

The AP wire story “Americans’ unhappy birthday: ‘Too much wrong right now’” link appeared the day after Independence Day. The story uses an Optimist Club meeting to discuss the general feelings by Americans that their nation is “on the wrong track” and that “something must be done.”

... talk turns to the state of the Union, and the Optimists become decidedly bleak.

They use words such as “terrified,” “disgusted” and “scary” to describe what one calls “this mess” we Americans find ourselves in. Then comes the list of problems constituting the mess: a protracted war, $4-a-gallon gas, soaring food prices, uncertainty about jobs, an erratic stock market, a tougher housing market, and so on and so forth.

One member’s son is serving his second tour in Iraq. Another speaks of a daughter who’s lost her job in the mortgage industry and a son in construction whose salary was slashed. Still another mentions a friend who can barely afford gas.

Joanne Kontak, 60, an elementary school lunch aide inducted just this day as an Optimist, sums things up like this: “There’s just entirely too much wrong right now.”

Some things Americans should feel unhappy about. The skyrocketing cost of gasoline is a big part of the pessimistic mood gripping the country. Seeing the price blast into the stratosphere through $4 a gallon heading into $5 gives us the feeling of a linear progression. What will stop it from hitting $6, $7 or more? People feel helpless and believe that there is nothing they can do.

But a dose of reason is in order.

First the ministers of OPEC themselves have stated that there is a bubble in oil right now. Contrary to what many think, OPEC does not like bubbles because it recognizes that high prices bring new supply onto the market as oil is extracted from deposits that were considered unprofitable at $70/barrel. Add in the cut in demand brought by higher prices and a collapse in oil prices is inevitable. While bubbles irrationally overinflate prices, collapsed bubbles (“corrections”) inevitably overshoot the true value of commodities as producers flood the market with product in order to get the best price they can before the price declines more. This floods the market further, and coupled with decreased demand the effects of collapsed prices take a long time to clear.

There are several factors that play into this including the concept of “peak oil” and political meddling with markets – such as the Indian and Chinese government subsidizing of petroleum products and environmental opposition to drilling in ANWAR and use of oil derived from shale. “Peak oil” remains a controversial topic and the political meddling with markets inevitably breaks down from the high cost of subsidies and the political cost of keeping supplies off the market.

Like all bubbles – tulips in the 17th century, precious metals in 1980 and Internet stocks in 2000 – the oil bubble will pop. The key is to curb our tendency to demand that government “do something” since such meddling could only make the situation worse. Anyone who remembers the lines at filling stations during the Carter administration should be surprised at their lack during the Bush administration. The difference is due to the Carter’s meddling in the market with price controls, something that Bush – for all his real and imagined faults – has not instituted.
Contrary to what some politicians have said, there are no magic bullets that will help Americans with high fuel prices. Options include driving less, buying more fuel efficient vehicles including those with manual transmissions instead of automatics, and for those who heat their homes with oil, lower the thermostat. But these options take time to work, and they don’t elect politicians to office.

Rising home prices caused by the real estate bubble gave home owners a sense of wealth that encouraged indebtedness and excessive spending. Now that the bubble has collapsed, home owners are left with the bills at the same time they watch properties sell in their neighborhood for less. Those with adjustable mortgages are in their own private hell as they are squeezed between higher payments, declining values, and higher fuel costs. Those who can get some relief through refinancing; unfortunately for many in thjs difficult position bankruptcy is not an option anymore thanks to the bankruptcy “reforms” sponsored by Democrat senators Joe Biden and Tom Carper. The only option is to walk away from their homes, which eventually leads to more properties on the market, driving down real estate values in a self-reinforcing cycle.

For those that keep their homes there aren’t any easy solutions. Home values will continue to decline until the supply of homes is met by demand for them. In the meantime homeowners should pay down debt and save more so that they can leap at the buying opportunities that will come around once the real estate market has bottomed out.

“There are so many things you have to do to survive now,” says Larue Lawson of Forest Park, Ill. “It used to be just clothes on your back, food on the table and a roof over your head. Now, it’s everything.

“I wish it was just simpler.”

Lawson, mind you, is all of 16 years old.
...
Stay-at-home-mom Heather Hammack grapples with tough decisions daily about how to spend her family’s dwindling income in the face of rising food costs. One day, she priced strawberries at $1.75. The next day, they were $2.28.

“I could cry,” she responds when asked how things are.

“We used to have more money than we knew what to do with. Now, I have to decide: Do I pay the electric this week? Do I pay for gas? Do I get groceries?” says Hammack, 24, who lives with her boyfriend, a window installer, and their 5-year-old son in a rented home in rural Rowlesburg, W.Va. “You can’t get ahead. You can’t save money. You can’t buy a house. It just stinks.”

When you have a sixteen year old whining about how complex life is, or a 24 year old stay-at-home mom crying about a $.53 increase in the cost of strawberries, then it’s time to open up a can of some old fashioned Protestant work ethics and values.

First off, Ms. Hammack has bigger problems than $2.28 strawberries. Getting married would save some on taxes, but the best thing to improve her family’s situation would be for her boyfriend to get training to do a job that pays more than window installing. Another idea would be for them to leave the rental home for a cheaper apartment. How much space do three people need after all? There are existing job training programs for low income wage earners; her boyfriend needs to take advantage of them. I am an advocate of stay-at-home parents; maybe her boyfriend should be the one taking care of her child at home if Heather Hammack can earn more than he can on the current job market. Regardless, it’s not the federal government’s job to improve their lot in life – it’s theirs! As for the sixteen year old, what perspective can he possibly offer on our current economic situation?

I’ll be honest and state that I am earning the same wage today that I was eight years ago. Am I angry at the government for that fact? No. During those years I invested time and money in building up my Wife’s career. She’s now in her last year of residency and poised to double our family income.

This is not the result of a government program to improve our lives; it was a conscious decision we made 10 years ago. Like any investment it was fraught with risk: What if the Wife doesn’t pass the MCAT? What if the Wife doesn’t get accepted into med school? What if the Wife can’t find a residency program that wants her? What if the value of the Wife’s specialty decreases while she’s in school and residency? And the biggest risk of all, what if we get divorced?

I switched careers five years ago because I viewed my old one as becoming technologically obsolete. Again there was considerable risk to doing this; developers in my specialty could do better as others left for greener pastures. Has it worked out? Aside from the importation of H-1b/L-1 labor that depresses my wages (an example of more government meddling in the labor market), whether it has or not is not the government’s fault. I made the choice.

Since the Bush administration was pilloried in 2005 for its slow response to Hurricane Katrina, some politicians including Barack Obama and leading Democrats like Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton have encouraged Americans to expect more from the federal government. This is taking the culture of dependence which saw Katrina victims waiting for help from the federal government instead of relying upon state and local governments and even themselves. The Democrats see such dependence as an avenue to power, a strategy that has been successful for them in large cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Now they want to take that patronage machine national, and turn the entire country into Chicago or Philadelphia.

Republicans are not spared blame for this malaise. Instead of extolling the benefits of free trade, lower taxes and smaller government, they expanded government entitlement programs during an economic boom fueled by trade while ignoring the pleas for lower taxes and responsible government from the Republican base. They became RINOs – Republican in Name Only. By doing so they allowed Democrats to portray the party as out of touch and corrupt – the very criticisms that the party’s base was leveling at the party leadership. As a consequence Democrats are on the attack using empty words like “hope” and “change” and the GOP plays the Democrats’ game by reacting to the statements instead of attacking the Democrats with their own rhetoric. “Change? You’re going to need it to pay your taxes when the Democrats win in November.” “Hope doesn’t stop al-Qaeda from slamming aircraft into skyscrapers.” But Republicans are in disarray and many in the base are waiting for the clobbering in November to return the party to its roots.

Democratic politicians do not know anything except the culture of dependence and entitlement. It is the culture they learn in the corrupt political machines of the cities, and from the agricultural subsidies they feed Agribusiness in the Midwest. They peddle a poison that paralyzes its victims and saps them of their humanity, turning them into slaves beholden to their masters that feed and clothe them. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” has become “What will my country do for me?”

The solution is not more government but less. It is the solution that ended the economic malaise of the Carter administration. Less government was the mantle worn by Ronald Reagan when he took office in 1981, and it remains the solution a generation later when Reagan’s old foes from the Carter administration are poised to retake the presidency under Obama.

Americans must counter the rhetoric of more government with a demand for personal responsibility. It is not the government’s job to make you happy; it’s job is to create the conditions that allow you to pursue happiness. Americans have forgotten this, and there is no Reagan around to remind them.

Being Free isn’t easy. With freedom comes responsibility, and Americans don’t seem to bear the latter very well. Weathering the financial storm that lays ahead with the continued collapse of the real estate and stock markets as well as the rising cost of energy and food will be tough. However electing politicians who promise “change” and “hope” will only place people in power with prior experience at really screwing the economy up. The price of energy will come down; home prices will stabilize if only Americans take responsibility of their own situations and not expect the federal government to fix it.

But will we?

An ex-Reaganite and Harvard Professor weighs in:

Hence, with no change in the current demand for oil, the expectation of a greater future demand and a higher future price caused the current price to rise. Similarly, credible reports about the future decline of oil production in Russia and in Mexico implied a higher future global price of oil – and that also required an increase in the current oil price to maintain the initial expected rate of increase in the price of oil.

Once this relation is understood, it is easy to see how news stories, rumors and industry reports can cause substantial fluctuations in current prices – all without anything happening to current demand or supply.

UPDATE: Now in print here http://tinyurl.com/aqxumk

I’m a conservative of the dreaded neo-con variety, but to me part of being a conservative is actually conserving resources – whether that is money, families or wildlife. While I don’t buy the anthropogenic global warming arguments, I’m not wedded to the petroleum lifestyle especially since I believe that preventing Saddam from invading Saudi Arabia in 1990 was a mistake (we should have let him clean out the Wahabis and Osama’s financiers in the Saudi royal family). Having lived through the 1970’s once, I would have hoped that over thirty years later we would have by now stopped shoveling cash to the Arabs; but we haven’t, and US politicians continue to refer to the Saudis as “our friends” and “allies” even as they rape us at the pump and fund madrassas that graduate homicide bombers instead of productive members of society.

I have never been keen on gas guzzlers because they waste money. I don’t like McMansions because they too are a waste to me. I like a car that gets me where I’m going as simply and cheaply as possible. Hummers and the super SUVs like the Chevy Suburban and Cadillac Escalade may be needed by some, but not by me. Similarly I value smaller, well built homes on large plots of land, the very opposite of today’s pressed board cookie-cutter monstrosities thrown up on good farmland right on top of each other – ghettos of the aspiring rich.

For the past several months I have been writing about energy and the enviroment, and one thing I’ve found is the paucity of data. As an amateur scientist I want to understand how we use energy, and whether there are better alternatives out there. It’s the same thing that drove Professor David J. MacKay, Professor of Natural Philosophy, Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, to write and distribute free his book “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.” (if that link is broken click here.) MacKay admits to being your typical Leftist UK professor – he can’t say the word “defence” without putting it in quotes, and parrots the party line about global warming. However typical Lefties don’t say this on the first page:

What’s this book about? I’m concerned about cutting UK emissions of twaddle – twaddle about sustainable energy. Everyone claims to be concerned, and every- one is encouraged to ‘make a difference’, but many of the things that allegedly make a difference don’t add up. Twaddle emissions are high at the moment because people get emotional (for example about wind farms or nuclear power) and no-one talks about numbers. Or if they do mention numbers, they select them to sound big, to make an impression, and to score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion. This is a straight-talking book about the numbers. The aim is to guide the reader around the claptrap to actions that really make a difference and to policies that add up.

He’s also not very keen on the belief propagated in the media, by companies, and by environmentalists themselves that “every little bit counts.” He counters “If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve a little.” This isn’t exactly the politically correct leftist propaganda I had expected, and it soon becomes clear why not: MacKay is a scientist first – leftist second. He states in the preface that he intends to explore the facts – not the ethical considerations that environmentalists like to use in their arguments instead of facts. And for the most part MacKay succeeds with the two exceptions noted earlier. In fact in fairness to MacKay, the AGW argument is the current scientific paradigm, and his support of the argument in the first chapter is nothing that an AGW sceptic hasn’t seen before. For those of you who are AGW sceptical, I’d recommend skipping this chapter and going right onto the next. MacKay does too good job of explaining the science behind energy production and use for an AGW sceptic to toss aside the rest of the book.

The book is divided into non-technical chapters with much of the technical stuff in the Appendix. He separates the technical discussions from the narrative in order to prevent the reader from getting lost; however anyone with a technical background will spend quite a bit of time flipping to the “back” of the book.

He focuses his book on the UK, and discusses the possibility of making that nation energy independent:

No single sustainable source matches our current consumption, even if much of the country were industrialized; and even all of onshore wind, shallow offhore wind, solar heating, solar PV at 12m2 per person, biomass, food, hydro, tide, wave, and geothermal together don’t reach 90 kWh/d. We can achieve a total substantially bigger than 125 kWh/d only by calling on deep offshore wind (covering an area bigger than Wales) and vast photovoltaic arrays (covering an area bigger than Wales).
Realistically, I don’t think Britain can live on its own renewables – at least not the way we currently live. I am partly driven to this conclusion by the chorus of opposition that greets any major renewable energy proposal. People love renewable energy, unless it is bigger than a figleaf. If the British are very good at one thing, it’s saying “no.” Wind farms across the country? “No, they’re ugly noisy things.” Solar panels on roofs? “No, that would spoil the visual amenity of the street.” An expansion of forestry? “Ruins the countryside.” Waste incineration? “No, I’m worried about health risks, traffc congestion, dust and noise.” Hydroelectricity? “Yes, but not big hydro – that harms the environment”. Offshore wind? “No, I’m more worried about the powerlines
coming ashore than I was about a Nazi invasion.” Wave or geothermal power? “No, far too expensive.”

He exhorts the media and environmentalists to get serious about the effort and move away from the myth that it will be easy to substitute renewables for fossil fuels.

Stop saying “we’ve got huge renewables,” and do the sums. To make a difference, renewable facilities have to be country-sized. For any renewable facility to make a contribution comparable to our current consumption, it has to be country-sized. To get a big contribution from wind, we used windfarms with the area of Wales. To get a big contribution from solar photovoltaics, we required the area of Wales. To get a big contribution from waves, we imagined wavefarms covering 500 km of coastline. To make energy crops with a big contribution, we took 75% of the whole country.
To sustain Britain’s lifestyle on its own renewables alone would be very diffcult. A renewable-based energy solution will necessarily be large and intrusive.
“Nuclear or wind?” is the wrong question. We need everything we can get our hands on – all the wind, and all the nuclear – and even then, we’re still in trouble.

For nuclear, he pays close attention to the risks and the deaths caused by its usage, calculating that on a deaths vs. energy output, it’s less dangerous than generally believed.

Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous. It’s just dangerous, much as coal mines, petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning and wind turbines are dangerous. Even if we have no guarantee against nuclear accidents in the future, I think the right way to assess nuclear is to compare it objectively with other sources of power.

This is a must-have book for anyone who is seriously interested in energy policy. The chapter discussing units of measurement and how they are intentionally misused to confuse listeners during debates is worth downloading alone. Without the flair of Mythbusters, MacKay still manages to write lucidly and convey his ideas.

One serious criticism I have with him is that his writing often runs into a wall of equations at the end of some chapters. It’s at these points that I am reminded that this is a first draft of his book; any decent editor could point out that he needs complete his chapters by translating what the technical information means to an interested reader. He could either combine the technical with the text by putting that info in the footnotes at the bottom of the page, or remove the technical verbage completely from the text and having a robust notes section in the appendix. It’s almost as if MacKay didn’t trust his own ability to translate the concepts and got scared when he approached a chapter’s end, so he supported his argument with technical details.

Another fault I have with the book is that he needs to scrub his personal politics from the text. As a leftist he focuses most on governmental and international solutions to the energy problem without spending enough time on the downsides of these solutions. While he mentions NIMBY he expects governments to act in ways that they are incapable of doing.  Any of his renewables strategies would be mired in bureaucratic red tape. Storing wind power by using it to pump water into lakes to be used to generate electricity during lulls in the wind is one example that would have to face red tape across governmental bureaucracies not to mention opposition from environmentalist groups opposed to dams and the fluctuating water supply his “solution” would entail. And we aren’t talking about ponds; the amount of energy we need the renewables solutions are all huge requiring lakes with surface areas as big as the Great Lakes.

Yet MacKay is at his finest when translating complex ideas to a lay audience,  and this book is good enough to maintain your interest for hours on end.  At the very least it will provide you with tons of statistics and calculations that you can use in debate.

Keep it handy when you hear someone say “Every little bit counts.” I just heard it said on the Forecast Earth segment on the Weather Channel. Worse, the show mentioned the largest wind farm in the world, the Horse Hollow Energy Center in Texas, produced 17 gigawatts, enough to power 1.1 million homes. I thought this was a little high after reading MacKay, so I checked and sure enough the Weather Channel had screwed up; it’s 737 megawatts which powers 169,000 homes on an average day. The Weather Channel was off by a factor of 8. Considering that the Weather Channel was founded by one of the leading AGW sceptics, it would be nice if it spent more time talking about the weather and less time propagandizing about the climate.

The Mother-in-law is a piece of work. While the woman is due respect for making it 83 years on this planet, to put it politely she has issues. One of her biggest problems is that she incessantly complains about anything and everything. When she gets in such a mood, the only thing to do is escape; anything else is an exercise in futility and usually leads to a meltdown with the Kid crying and the Wife using language that she hasn’t used since she left the Navy.

The truth of the matter is that the Mother-in-law enjoys taking her unhappiness out on those around her. She uses her unhappiness as a weapon and derives pleasure in doing that. In such a state the only way to “handle” her is to avoid her.

Here’s a classic example that has been repeated about once every month for the past decade.

MiL: I don’t think I can spend another summer/winter/spring/fall in this house.
Wife: You could move into an apartment.
MiL: I don’t want to do that. It’s too depressing.
W: How about downsizing to a condo?
MiL: I’ve read those aren’t good investments.
W: You could move in with us. (my screams are usually heard at this point).
MiL: No, I don’t want to be a burden. I’ll just get in the way.
W: Well how about an assisted living facility.
MiL: Those are for dying people. Your father died in one. Do you want me to go someplace to die? (I tend to nod or pump the air with my fist here). I could try an Over-55 community.
W: That’s a good idea.
MiL: But Maris Grove doesn’t have an assisted living facility.
W: No, but they are building one.
MiL: But what if I move in and I need it right away? Besides, it’s too expensive.”
W: You could fix up your house to make it easier to care for?
MiL: With what money? No, I don’t think I can spend another summer/winter/spring/fall in this house.

The time passes; she’s lived in her house for over thirty years, three of it alone since her husband passed away. And the situation doesn’t change because she effectively rules out all possible choices and boxes herself in to the status quo.

Unfortunately I’m seeing the Democrats and many alternative energy people do the same thing when it comes to oil. Last week the Democratic House rejected a bill that would have expanded oil exploration offshore. A week before the Democrats killed a bill that would have ended a moratorium for enacting rules governing oil shale development on federal lands.

Democrats have prevented the usage of coal-liquid fuel by the military and, as a side effect of their legislation, the usage of oil derived from oil sands in Alberta Canada.

In a letter dated March 17 to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Waxman wrote the clause was in response to proposals by the Air Force to develop coal-to-liquid fuels which produce almost double the greenhouse gas emissions of comparable conventional fuel.

“The provision is also applicable to fuels derived from tar sands, which produce significantly higher greenhouse gas emissions than are produced by comparable fuel from conventional petroleum sources.”

...American refineries that import Canadian crude will be caught in the middle: They will have to sacrifice the importation of Alberta crude to adhere to the US legislation.

Environmentalists have also opposed importing oil from the Alberta oil sands due to the higher greenhouse gas emissions. They have opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the Democrats in Congress have consistently supported them and kept that oil off the market and in the ground. Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah voiced his frustration in an interview with Fortune:

It’s pathetic. Environmentalists are very happy having us dependent on foreign oil. They’re unhappy with us developing our own. What they forget to say is that shipping fuel all the way from the middle east has a big greenhouse gas footprint too.

So at a time when demand for oil is skyrocketing in India and China – the latter of which has price controls to protect consumers from the high price of oil that would curb their demand for it – the Democrats and their environmentalist supporters limit our choices to expand the supply of oil and drive down its price.

Democrats: We need to do something about the high price of oil.
Americans: Absolutely. We could increase the supply of oil by drilling in the Arctic or importing oil from Canada that derives from its plentiful oil sands.
Dems: That will disturb the polar bears and produce too much greenhouse gas.
Ams: We could produce oil from shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
Dems: That could ruin the view from our ski chalets in Vail. Besides oilmen are dirty and drive the wrong kind of cars.
Ams: Gas guzzlers?
Dems: No, domestic.
Ams: We could increase offshore drilling.
Dems: What, and spoil the views from our beach-front properties?
Ams: Well what should we do?
Dems: Dunno, but we really need to do something about the high price of oil.

And yes my Mother-in-law is a lifelong Democrat