LifeItself

For most people the Big Recession of 2009 has never ended.  It has not ended as well for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, museums, policemen, firefighters, municipalities, counties, states, and so on. This recession has not ended, yet we see inflation in every aspect of the lives of ordinary people: fuels, food (even the food-like edible substances that masquerade as food in the U.S.), and clothing.  Click on the image to see the original size There is a reason why food and fuels are excluded from the government measure of "core" inflation, which then becomes a game of controlling how fast we print and price new money relative to how fast we improve productivity.  Over the last several decades, the Federal Reserve has become quite good in playing that control game, and the rest seemed OK.  But not this time. So what is different now? Why do the Left and the Right offer such dramatically different solutions to the same p...

At noon today I was asked by the Austin Chapter of Sierra Club to do a joint interview on the first anniversary of the Macondo well tragedy.  This is what I said: Tad Patzek, Remarks at the 4/20/2011 media event organized by Sierra Club Noon Press Event at 11th & Congress in Austin.  For full disclosure l need to tell you that I am Chairman of the first-ranked petroleum engineering department in the country, and I am very proud of it.  I have not come here to bash oil, because hydrocarbons, oil and natural gas , as well as coal, have underwritten both the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution that have produced the wind turbines and solar photovoltaics, as well as all components of the electric cars we all like so much.  Without fossil fuels, all modern renewable energy sources would be dead before arrival . Because the real production rate of liquid petroleum is peaking and the imaginary additions are unlikely to make up for the rate deficit,...

Almost as a direct challenge to my March 26th  post, I got this lovely comment on my recent article in the Austin Statesman: Most important message Re: April 10 article "Deep drilling reflects era's decline, Texas expert says." The article by professor Tad Patzek about the planet's declining oil reserves contains the most important message your paper can publish this year. As he points out so clearly and simply that anyone who reads it must understand, our species is driving heedlessly toward a very messy extinction unless we change both our driving habits and our reliance on fossil fuels. Any rational Austinite who reads and faces up to the facts stated in this article will become an ardent supporter of local light rail as well as a carbon tax. And he/she will advise his/her children and grandchildren to move closer to downtown, near a rail line and a farmer's market, or else become self-sufficient farmers themselves unless they can somehow acqui...

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 real...

When I talk or write, people often tell me they are depressed with what I tell them.  These people crave for a more palatable approach that belongs to Bokonon: I wanted all things To seem to make sense, So we all could be happy, yes, Instead of tense. And I made up lies So that they all  fit nice, And I made this sad world A par-a-dise Bokonon's Calypso , Kurt Vonnegut, " Cat's Cradle ," p. 127. Bokonon's true power is in imagining other people's dreams before they realize what it is that makes them happy. Bokonon's approach is commonly applied in all mass media, including advertizing and some of the major science journals. It has also been the standard operating procedure in all religions since times immemorial and in politics. In short, Bokonon's Calypso reflects human nature and my creations do not. Therein lies my problem in communicating with the public.

Here is the best reflection I could find of how humans thought about science, technology and complexity in the year 2011.  On March 19th, Mr. Jeff Sommer wrote his masterful piece, A Crisis That Markets Can’t Grasp , which was published by NYT on the front page of the Sunday Business Section.  Here are the salient quotations: The details of this catastrophe [of the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant] were unforeseeable, leading some to conclude this was a black swan event — something so wildly unexpected, so enormous in its impact, that it seems to defy our understanding and expose the fragility of our knowledge of the world. How could anyone have predicted this ? ... So perhaps a bigger question is whether the markets — in which we have come to place so much trust — can put a true price on outsize risks like this. Many have compared the events unfolding in Japan with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009, t...