Random Notes  

Aspiring Prime Minister Peter Costello has demonstrated just how ignorant he is about the oil supply / demand balance in his remarks during a visit to Indonesia.

The Costello prescription: high oil prices are "not going to be fixed on the demand side, it's going to be fixed on the supply side". The reality: there is little to no flexibility on the supply side, the fix is going to be on the demand side. Its not just that he doesn't understand (or accept) peak oil but that he thinks that pressuring Indonesia (a net importer of oil, in spite of its OPEC membership, and one that is hurting far more from rising prices than Australia is) will make any difference to the global balance of oil supply and demand.

There was little the government could do to cut soaring petrol prices except pressure oil exporting nations to boost production, Treasurer Peter Costello said today. Mr Costello, speaking in Jakarta where he was due to meet Indonesian government officials later today, said he would be pushing nations such as Indonesia to boost production as one way of taking pressure off high prices. He warned high prices were not only a risk to net oil importing nations such as Australia but to exporters themselves because of what might happen to the global economy.

Mr Costello said he would raise with Indonesia, a member of OPEC, and at meeting of Asia Pacific finance ministers later this week, the need to boost oil production globally. "We would like to see those oil exporting countries that can do so lift production," he told reporters."We don't think it's in the interest of oil importers, and Australia is a net oil importer, the high prices. "We don't think long term it's in the interests of the exporter themselves, because what they need is reliable customers to be assured of reliable prices. I don't think it's in the long term interests to have wild fluctuations in the the world oil price."

Mr Costello said high oil prices could affect nations such as China, upon which Australia's economy is increasingly dependant. He said high oil prices could precipitate a recession, which would be good for no one. "If the world went into recession then prices would come back down, but we do not want to go into reccssion," Mr Costello said.

"This is not going to be fixed on the demand side, it's going to be fixed on the supply side."

Unable to resist sticking his foot in his mouth on other subjects he knows nothing about, he has also been babbling away repeating the nuclear industry's talking points. Lets start at the beginning - nuclear power will not save us from global warming....

RealClimate is the definitive source for information on climate change of course, and in the wake of Katrina they've considered the question "Hurricanes and Global Warming - Is There a Connection ?".

On Monday August 29, Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, Louisiana and Missisippi, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. It will be some time until the full toll of this hurricane can be assessed, but the devastating human and environmental impacts are already obvious.

Katrina was the most feared of all meteorological events, a major hurricane making landfall in a highly-populated low-lying region. In the wake of this devastation, many have questioned whether global warming may have contributed to this disaster. Could New Orleans be the first major U.S. city ravaged by human-caused climate change?

The correct answer--the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) --is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming - and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

Yet this is not the right way to frame the question. As we have also pointed out in previous posts, we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.

The key connection is that between sea surface temperatures (we abbreviate this as SST) and the power of hurricanes. Without going into technical details about the dynamics and thermodynamics involved in tropical storms and hurricanes (an excellent discussion of this can be found here), the basic connection between the two is actually fairly simple: warm water, and the instability in the lower atmosphere that is created by it, is the energy source of hurricanes. This is why they only arise in the tropics and during the season when SSTs are highest (June to November in the tropical North Atlantic).

The Australian Financial Review also had a good article (insert usual jibe about paywall) on global warming and Katrina on the weekend ("Debate heats up over global warming"), noting the linkage between global warming and the damage done by Katrina, and saying that people in the US are starting to talk seriously about the need to do something. Better 15-20 years late than never I guess.

The IEA is warning of a potential energy crisis.

The head of the West's energy watchdog said in an interview on Saturday that Hurricane Katrina could spark a worldwide energy crisis if damage to U.S. refineries led to a big increase in U.S. purchases of European petrol.

"If the crisis affects oil products then it's a worldwide crisis. No one should think this will be limited to the United States," Claude Mandil, head of the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) told German daily Die Welt

The airlines (one variety of canary in the peak oil coalmine) are struggling to cope with rising oil prices and some are already raising fares to adjust.

The Oil Drum has a fairly positive update about repairs and recommissioning of refineries, pipelines and the LOOP in the GOM.

Schlumberger has a report of blasts in the Iranian oil fields (in Khuzestan province, which I've referred to previously as a potential flashpoint for a US invasion of Iran)

In Iraq, another bomb blast had set fire to the Kirkuk pipeline.

The Times has a rosy (and totally over-optimistic) assessment of biofuels in England. Refer to Monbiot.

Farmers will become the new oil barons as climate change and diminishing oil supplies turn plants into the environmentally friendly wonder fuel.

Crooked Timber has an interesting piece on "Myths about America", which is an Irish view of how running a country on the basis of an endless flood of cheap oil affects everything.

The Hurricane Katrina disaster and looming political crisis aren’t easy for an outsider to decipher. But we do have one advantage; not having believed in many American myths in the first place. For starters, the myth that the US is a generous and free country where anyone can achieve almost anything.

The abundance – of food, cars, roads, tv stations, just about everything a European could imagine, and then some – is probably unprecedented historically, and limited geographically to America. Growing up comfortably middle class in Ireland in the early 1980s, I found it almost unbelievable that T.V. Americans seemed to drink orange joice every day when we had it just for Christmas, went shopping just for fun and could afford to keep their enormous fridges constantly full.

In my own fuzzy-logic way, I’d presumed that the cheapness of every day goods in the US was mostly because of the flexibility of the economy, i.e. the ability of employers to pay low wages, fire at will, offer few benefits, and generally pass on costs like environmental protection or maternity benefits. A few weeks in California cured me. Sure, labour ‘flexibility’ helps. But the cheap price of petrol is more important than I’d ever imagined. As newspapers and coffee breaks filled with doomsday scenarios of paying $6 dollars a gallon for gas, I sat down one day and did the sums.

That’s what we pay in Ireland. Today.

Most of the extra cost goes in taxes, and the cost of that affects every imagineable part of life. Paying more for oil makes everything more expensive – getting food to the shops, from there home, cooking it, and cleaning up afterwards. It means more people rely on public transport, creating a policy feedback loop of greater government spending and making more citizens using shared resources every day of their lives. It means we don’t run central heating or air conditioning all or most the time, and probably just put on another jumper when it’s cold. It means we advertise cars based on their fuel consumption and we don’t have ‘all you can eat’ restaurant buffets. Teenagers don’t have their own jobs and cars, and rely on their parents, the bus or shanks mare to get around. They get it off in parks instead of cars. Not that many people drive to the gym. Until recently, not many people needed to go to the gym either.

Others on CT understand far better than I do the economic significance of America’s globally unique strategy of running a vast economy on cheap, cheap oil. And yet others can discuss how this dependence makes America less and less secure. (And how Amerca’s efforts to secure its own oil supply has made the world less and less secure for the rest of us.) It’s been a simple but revealing insight for me; the myth that America’s economic engine purrs along fuelled by of the virtues of its rather brutal labour market is only partly true. US work places may be dominated by the masochistic ideology of living to work, but the secret of success is simple. America lives or dies on cheap oil.

That’s one myth. Then there’s the myth that this is the land of opportunity. That anyone born a citizen can aspire to being president. Even if she didn’t go to Yale. And that anyone can use their own hard work and ingenuity to make it rich. This is one myth that many Europeans envy and also, sometimes, despise – mostly because we’d like to believe it too. It’s just that while in theory anyone can be a doctor or president, the reality is that you really only have a chance if your father was one too. Even the Economist grudgingly admits that social mobility is higher in Germany (Germany!) than it is in the US.

Moving to a few tidbits on the aftermath of the Hurricane, its great to see co-franchisee MonkeyGrinder back at the keyboard and coolly making a few pertinent observations on the fallout and on President Bush (who I might be tempted label a Nazi monster, but MG has too much sangfroid for that sort of thing). He is the first person I've seen since the storm to notice the soaked, bedraggled and starving elephant in the corner of the room - Jay Hanson saying "I told you so". Bill Henderson has a similar assessment in CounterCourrents. I like to believe a better future is possible but as long as those fascists, sorry - neocons, are in charge in Washington Jay could well turn out to be right.

WorldChanging has a more pleasant vision of the future called "Dreaming a New New Orleans".

Billmon has aptly labelled Bush "The Potemkin President" (which isn't surprising after all the reports of staged relief efforts that dissipated as soon as media attention turned elsewhere):

Having recently watched the German film Downfall (Der Untergang) [BG: great film] -- an excruciatingly realistic reenactment of the Third Reich's final days -- it's hard not to be struck by certain psychological similarities. Not because the Bush diehards are Nazis (although the willngness of some to blame the black population of New Orleans for all that's gone wrong has a definite fascist edge to it) but because of the totalitarian worldview they share.

For many Germans -- fanatical Nazis as well as the naive and the weak-minded -- believing Hitler's absurd promises of ultimate victory was the only alterrnative to accepting a world in which evil (Bolshevism, world Jewry) had triumphed and good (National Socialism, the Aryan superman) had failed. Such a world was either unimaginable, or unendurable.

Likewise, for the conservative ultras to accept Bush's failures now would be to admit the patriotic demi-God constructed after 9/11 by the White House propaganda machine (and, ironically, by the mainstream media ) doesn't exist. All that would be left would be the real Bush: the incompetent, arrogant rich kid who's failed at every significant job he's ever held -- from CEO of Arbusto Energy to commander in chief of the planet's most powerful military machine. For many Bushistas, this is equally unbearable.

Thus we see, for example, the gang at Powerline insisting that the entire city of New Orleans owes Bush a profound debt of gratitude simply for requesting a total evacuation of the city -- even though the federal government neither offered nor provided the resources required to move tens of thousands of poor, elderly, disabled and sick people to safety. This is like a bunch of diehard Nazis insisting the citizens of Berlin should be eternally grateful to their Fuehrer for not surrendering their city to the Russians.

For those who can't stand the reality, but are too intelligent to believe a complete fantasy, there's always the age-old resort to scapegoats. For the GOP quasi-fascists, this means the looters (the black ones anyway). As if looting were the exclusive domain of low-income African Americans, rather than the inevitable result when civic order collapses as completely as it did in New Orleans last week.

Some of our neo-Confederates in Right Blogostan should read up on the fall of Richmond in 1865, when hordes of lilly white men and woman rampaged through the burning streets, drunk as lords (and ladies) on stolen whiskey. Or Chicago after the great fire, or Johnstown PA after the flood. Or, for that matter, what frequently happens in nice white-bread college towns whenever the local team loses (or wins) a football game.

...

Right now, however, the frantic fantasy spinning and excuse making of the diehards isn't being matched among the GOP big shots. Granted, the party machinery remains in loyalist hands, as demonstrated by the fundraising letter that Ken Melhman sent out Thursday lauding the strength of the U.S. economy -- which had about as much connection to current political reality as Hitler's final orders from the bunker had to the military realities of 1945. But in official Republican Washington as a whole, there's been an sudden and startling collapse of what was formerly a seamless defensive front. Yet another two-dimensional Potemkin village has toppled over.

The single most shocking piece of TV I've seen on Katrina was an interview with Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish President, who told a truly horrible tale. Past Peak has the transcript (which doesn't do the full horror of the video justice).

MR. AARON BROUSSARD: We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast, but the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. I am personally asking our bipartisan congressional delegation here in Louisiana to immediately begin congressional hearings to find out just what happened here. Why did it happen? Who needs to be fired? And believe me, they need to be fired right away, because we still have weeks to go in this tragedy. We have months to go. We have years to go. [...]

MR. RUSSERT: Shouldn't the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans bear some responsibility? Couldn't they have been much more forceful, much more effective and much more organized in evacuating the area?

MR. BROUSSARD: Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA — we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday — yesterday — FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America — American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis. [...]

I want to give you one last story and I'll shut up and let you tell me whatever you want to tell me. The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night. [...]

Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. [DHS] secretary [Chertoff] has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.

Why did Bush and Chertoff let old people drown in their nursing homes days after the hurricane went through ? Why was FEMA cutting phone lines ? Why where they stopping water and diesel getting through ?

Past Peak also notes that excuses about resuce teams not being able to reach the Superdome and Convention Centre were nonsense, given how easy the media got in (and as we saw on TV here, got people out as well, roadblocks not withstanding - I guess you can always bribe officials in a banana republic, regardless of what their orders from the bosses are).

TomDispatch has an article called "Iraq in America: The Perfect Storm and the Feral City", which goes over the history of predictions that New Orleans could one day meet this fate - including a lot of talk during hurricane Ivan last year. Of course, Bush and Chertoff would have us believe that it was all a huge surprise that no one could have prepared for.

The Financial Times is also getting stuck into the Bush administration for their abject incompetence (to be kind about it) - Jerome a Paris has the story. Paul Craig Roberts is noting that by 2024 the US will be a third world country based on current economic trends. And as I close Christopher Hitchens is on the TV and he just called the US a "Banana Republic" as well.

Is anyone going to arrest the slide (it clearly won't be the malignant clowns currently in charge) ?