Random Notes  

Lots of good stuff around but I'm running out of time tonight so I'll keep the commentary to a minimum - hopefully I'll get the chance to write a few longer pieces of my own soon.

Stuart at The Oil Drum has taken a look at the importance of the post-peak depletion rate which makes for interesting reading. Two of the comments worth highlighting:

I'm also very dubious about whether effective warning signals will actually occur. The classic economic assumption that markets receive perfect information, including warnings, can't possibly be correct under these circumstances because:

1. We don't have good information on production and reserves now.

2. We will not have good information on the timing of the peak: it can only be verified some time (2 years?) after the fact.

3. Oil companies, as we've seen already, are unlikely to tell their investors that they are in a long-term decline.

4. Governments aren't talking either. The Jimmy Carter experiment in telling the truth about oil was intellectually and ethically correct, and politically disastrous. It won't be repeated anytime soon.

And:

"We'd see massive investments in coal to liquids and tar sands, which are known to produce replacements for oil, it's just that scaling them up in time seems infeasible under current circumstances."

I sure hope that will only be a small part of the solution, because otherwise we're just heading for peak coal and peak tar sands, and more global warming and air pollution.

I'd hope that massive investments would happen in solar, wave and wind technologies along with the extremely important efficiency and conservation sectors.

Counter Currents has an article called "The silent oil crisis" which looks at the impact of rising oil prices on the third world.

BHP's oil production in the GOM still "shut-in" after Katrina.

There have been protests in Jamaica about fuel prices, coinciding with the Caribbean Oil Summit.

Fuel subsidies are crumbling in India (as they are in Indonesia)

Rigzone reports on rising orders for oil rigs in Singapore (where local builders have some impressively large order books).

I've noticed a number of biofuel articles - the BBC has one on growing "Tall grasses" for use as biomass in power generation. High Heating oil prices are fueling firewood sales (and prices) in the north east of the US. TreeHugger has an article on unsustainable "strip mining" of moss (more for horticulture than biofuel, admittedly).

Meteor Blades at Kos has a vision of the future for New Orleans called "Eco New Orleans: 'A Shining Example for the Whole World'".

Past Peak has been posting all sorts of interesting stuff lately, as has MonkeyGrinder.

Jeff Vail has another interesting post up called "Is Castro Still Relevant ?".

I'm reminded of the classic Monty Python lines: "Look, I'm being repressed! See the violence inherent in the system." But seriously, is this Cold War-era holdout still a relevant force in today's world? Yes, and here's why:

Cuba offered 1,100 doctors to help out with the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina, that could have been in place last Wednesday. The US State Department said "no thanks." Sure, we could construe this as political manuevering on Castro's part, but he has accepted US post-hurricane aid in the past few years, so that argument doesn't hold much water. This is the same Castro who is dealing remarkably well with the huge loss of subsidy from the former USSR, and is on the cutting edge of adapting to a post-peak oil world. Is he a repressive and autocratic figure? Sure. Is he turning away a thousand desparately needed doctors because he thinks that politics take priority over the welfare of poor, black people? No, but the US government is.

Quite a few people have pointed out that while Chertoff and co claim that the impact Katrina wasn't predictable, even most National Geographic readers would have had a very good idea how things would turn out - from October last year.

There are still plenty of unsettling stories circulating in the wake of the hurricane. The Herald Sun has a story of some students from South Carolina who drove down to help out.

Steve at Deconsumption notes that the stories about children being raped (or anyone else for that matter) at the Superdome were crap, as I suspected. Ask yourself who makes this sort of thing up. And I think there are plenty of other questions about the response to the hurricane that need to be answered. Of course, history is written by the victors and I suspect Bush and co will be producing a staggering work of fiction over the coming months.

DailyKos has some stories from people who have made it out of New Orleans.

Someone has put together a list of Katrina "mistakes, evasions and deceptions".

Given my cynicism on this topic I'll provide a bunch of parahistory links for the interested to sift through - while I'd never suggest all this stuff is true, I think there are enough grains of truth amongst the theorising to do some thinking about and wonder what's going on.

Wayne Madsen has been following a number of weird events. Mike Ruppert is getting ever more strident.. Xymphora has mentioned "ethnic cleansing" a number of times lately. Rigourous Intuition has a number of typically occult posts. And I'll even give Alex Jones a link (reader beware of course).

On a less conspiratorial note, William Rivers Pitt predicts that the hurricane may signal trigger "Washing Away the Conservative Movement".

Somewhere, at this moment, a neoconservative is seething because his entire belief structure regarding government has been laid waste by a storm of singular ferocity. Hurricane Katrina has destroyed lives, ravaged a city, damaged our all-important petroleum infrastructure, and left every American with scenes of chaos and horror seared forever into their minds. Simultaneously, Hurricane Katrina has annihilated the fundamental underpinnings of conservative governmental philosophy.

What we are seeing in New Orleans is the end result of what can be best described as extended Reaganomics. Small government, budget cuts across the board, tax cuts meant to financially strangle the ability of federal agencies to function, the diversion of billions of what is left in the budget into military spending: This has been the aim and desire of the conservative movement for decades now, and they have been largely successful in their efforts.

Combine this with a wildly expensive and unnecessary war, rampant cronyism that replaces professionals with unqualified hacks at nearly every level of government, and the basic neoconservative/Straussian premise that the truth is not important and that the so-called elite know best, and you have this catastrophe laid out on a platter. The conservative and neoconservative plan for the way this country should be run has been blasted to matchsticks, their choice of priorities exposed as lacking, to say the very least.

The Katrina disaster in a nutshell: A storm that had been listed for years as #3 on America's list of "Worst Possible Things That Could Happen" arrives in New Orleans to find levees unprepared because massive budget cuts stripped away any ability to repair and augment them. The storm finds FEMA, the national agency tasked to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters, run by Bush friend Michael Brown, a guy who got fired from his last job representing the rights of Arabian horse owners. The storm finds a goodly chunk of the Louisiana National Guard sitting in a desert 7,000 miles away with their high-water Humvees parked beside them. The storm finds that our institutional decades-old unwillingness to address poverty issues left tens of thousands of people unable to get out of the way of the ram.

Grover Norquist, one of the ideological leaders of our current administration, once said he wanted to shrink the federal government until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. Well, those who believe in his view of things have worked very hard to accomplish this, and we see now what happens when you do that. In this case, the government did not drown. An American city did.