LifeItself

The Amazon forest is burning. If you look at the satellite map in Figure 1, you will see that Brazil's tropical forest is being methodically plundered and destroyed by people who mean business. That Brazilian  "friend" of our own destroyer of the world is doing his best to encourage the burning and empower his criminal supporters. But on the multiple aerial photos of the forest, I also see drought. Parts of the rain forest are dry and ready to be burned. Global climate change is likely a contributing factor. In summary, a brutal liquidation of the priceless rain forest by the criminal farmers and ranchers running amok + climate change and drying of the forest = a global-scale calamity.

And so that you have a clearer concept of what is happening here, president Trump is directly and personally implicated in the big Amazon burn. By blocking the Midwestern farmers from selling soybeans to China and US ranchers from selling beef to China, he created a giant new market in Bra…

As Nicholas Taleb stated in "Antifragility":
Now as a skeptical empiricist, I do not consider that resisting new technology is necessarily irrational: Waiting for time to operate its testing might be a valid approach if one holds that we have an incomplete picture of things. This is what naturalistic risk management is about. [ I.e., management of risk by nature, TWP.] However, it is downright irrational if one holds on to an old technology that is not naturalistic at all yet visibly harmful, or when the switch to a new technology ... is obviously free of possible side effects that did not exist with the previous one.  (Page 191) So what does this statement have to do with the current developments in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas?  It turns out that a lot.

First, both sides in the Arctic disputes have taken fragile, absolutist positions. Environmentalists claim that there is no technology that could ever be applied in the Arctic from here to eternity, because all technologie…

Picture a vast gray ocean that dissolves into gray sky pregnant with heavy dark clouds, and a gray flat sandy shore that slowly oozes up from the Chukchi Sea.  This is what our Ocean Energy Advisory Committee saw from the Coast Guard C130 plane, chartered by BSEE's Director, Admiral James Watson.

In summer, the Arctic ocean is dotted with white ice floes. In winter all is frozen.




This vast empty space is the neighborhood of Point Barrow, the settlement closest to the Burger Prospect in the Chukchi Sea. Here, Shell will attempt again to drill their first wells in 2013.  Despite Shell's valiant efforts in 2012, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on preparations, not a single well was drilled and completed.




Here are some of the difficulties with drilling and operating offshore oil and gas wells in the Arctic, west and north of Alaska: 
Gas vs. oil. Natural gas is not oil.  Gas price and remoteness of the Arctic make offshore gas production and transport unprofitable. Let…

This blog is a companion to "The Discrete Charm of Living at the Peak."

If you follow national media, you are probably convinced by now that in 10-15 years from today, the United States will be producing enough oil to become independent of foreign oil suppliers.  (In most predictions of energy independence, Canada and Mexico are treated as the almost domestic oil suppliers.)

So can the United States of America be dependent only on domestic crude oil production and imports from Canada augmented by Mexico? This scenario is not as nonsensical as it may sound, if (1) the United States continues to destroy demand for petroleum just as it has in the last four years; and (2) crude oil imports from Canada increase dramatically, because Mexico will not be able to export much crude oil in 5-10 years from now.  Since 2008, the U.S. has destroyed demand for 2 million barrels of crude oil per day, which translates into an average annual destruction rate of about 0.5 million barrels of oi…

Yesterday I was in Dallas.  I participated in a panel discussion: "What Cost Gas Drilling?" at the 48th Annual Conference of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) that took place in the beautiful Collins Executive Center at SMU.

The participants of my panel included Mr. Calvin Tillman, the Mayor of Dish, Texas; David Pool, Senior VP and General Counsel of Range Resources; Elizabeth Souder, a Staff Writer for the Dallas Morning News; and Andrea Gabor, a Professor of Business Journalism at the Baruch College - the panel leader.

Mr Tillman's deep anguish and fear for his children made the largest impression on me.  Mr. Tillman was demonized by the industry sources as an unreasonable person, who made crazy demands on the well-meaning companies producing natural gas in his community.  Mr. Tillman says that he is quitting the mayor's job, and is moving away from Dish to protect his children from what he fears are real health threats.

It was really h…