[shortonoil]

Rag head #17 joins the fray, and no one to stop them:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-0 ... ment-qatar

The US has so screwed up its influence in the Middle East that it couldn't get a camel neutered. Maybe if the US started beating women in the public square for driving a car, and having children's hands cut off for stealing a candy bar It could gain a little respect from these Neanderthals. In the meantime it will just have to keep selling them the weapons that they can use to blow up each others oil fields. The New American Century is working out real well!

[ROCKMAN]

Adam - "This is all quite amazing. I need to really go to one of those retirement seminars the company schedules." As far as SS there's no need. As I said earlier the govt SS tells you all you need to know and is a short and very easy read.

[ROCKMAN]

Just another example of how full of sh*t some folks here were who claimed the light oil from the shales plays was "of little value" to us:

Reuters - Venezuela's 187,000-barrel-per-day Puerto la Cruz refinery is running at 16 percent of capacity, mainly due to a lack of light oil as state-run PDVSA ships a portion of its Mesa 30 crude to Cuba and Curacao.

Oil company PDVSA in March resumed exports of Mesa 30 to Cuba after an eight-month pause. It has shipped between 850,000 barrels and 1.4 million barrels per month to the Caribbean island since then, documents show.

Mesa 30 - one of Venezuela's lightest crudes - is used by PDVSA and its partners to dilute the extra heavy oil produced in the vast Orinoco Belt and to feed several domestic refineries. But with its oil output falling, the company is struggling to satisfy its domestic network and its foreign clients, according to internal sources and reports.

"Diverting crude is one of the causes of the refinery's status, but there is also lack of maintenance," said Jose Bodas, a union leader at Puerto la Cruz who last month warned about the facility's low processing."

[Outcast_Searcher]

Rag head #17 joins the fray, and no one to stop them:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-0 ... ment-qatar

The US has so screwed up its influence in the Middle East that it couldn't get a camel neutered. Maybe if the US started beating women in the public square for driving a car, and having children's hands cut off for stealing a candy bar It could gain a little respect from these Neanderthals. In the meantime it will just have to keep selling them the weapons that they can use to blow up each others oil fields. The New American Century is working out real well!

Or in the real world, due to technology (like fracking and the advancement of battery tech), America is managing to move toward true energy independence over time. EVEN IF, luck, instead of intelligent long term policy planning and implementation, is playing the major role in that movement.

Even if the US fracking bonanza only lasts a couple of decades, it will buy the EV movement and green energy movement a tremendous windfall in getting cranked up. Obviously, once the majority of US vehicles are EV's (which I think we have a good shot at in 20 years), we can tell the Middle East and their terrorists to literally go pound sand if they don't want to behave in a civil manner, re the rest of the world.

Oh, and in time, if needed, the rest of the world will exploit the various ex-US tight oil frackable reserves -- they're just a decade or more behind the US in doing so. The book "The Domino Effect" does an effective job of explaining why this is so.

But I know, we CAN'T look at things that way, as that isn't consistent with the constant drumbeat of omnipresent economic doom in our faces.

Well, despite things being far from perfect, they're FAR from certain doom -- especially in the short term. (As long as you can look at the world outside the lens of zerohedge).

[kublikhan]

Wanna bet on that?

A world reserve currency which is backed by mostly garbage; which is powered by oil that is ever more useless; controlled by unscrupulous, diabolical camel jockeys and sand niggers.

Three to one odds that the Middle East is burning before King Salman bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud collects another wife.

Rag head #17 joins the fray, and no one to stop them:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-0 ... ment-qatar

The US has so screwed up its influence in the Middle East that it couldn't get a camel neutered. Maybe if the US started beating women in the public square for driving a car, and having children's hands cut off for stealing a candy bar It could gain a little respect from these Neanderthals. In the meantime it will just have to keep selling them the weapons that they can use to blow up each others oil fields. The New American Century is working out real well!

WTF? Someone challenges your BS and you turn into Michael Richards?

[vtsnowedin]

Obviously, once the majority of US vehicles are EV's (which I think we have a good shot at in 20 years), we can tell the Middle East and their terrorists to literally go pound sand if they don't want to behave in a civil manner, re the rest of the world.

.

Sadly the only way to make terrorist behave in a civil way is to exterminate them. It will be an inhumane thing to do but they are doing their best to drive us to it.

[AdamB]

Wanna bet on that?

A world reserve currency which is backed by mostly garbage; which is powered by oil that is ever more useless; controlled by unscrupulous, diabolical camel jockeys and sand niggers.

A little heated discussion and the real person is revealed I see.

In addition to being weak on science, Shorty is a flagrant racist. Could this possibly fuel some of your doomerism? This desire to see this or that group suffer?

Colin was anti-immigrant, and Catton was both anti-immigrant, and anti people of color. I believe you are correct though that this fits within the "doomer as misanthrope" angle though. So shorty is yet another "the world needs to end...for all THOSE guys..." type. Not even a surprise, but as you say, a few questions and the real shorty reveals himself.

[AdamB]

Adam - "This is all quite amazing. I need to really go to one of those retirement seminars the company schedules." As far as SS there's no need. As I said earlier the govt SS tells you all you need to know and is a short and very easy read.

My retirement involves more complexity than just the $$ involved that SS is going to cough up. But the understanding that SS $$ aren't affected by the one thing that matters is quite a welcome piece of information.

[ROCKMAN]

Adam - I know one aspect outside of SS that catches some by surprise: if you don't pulling monies out of 401k et al soon enough the feds start hurting you financially.

[Cog]

Minimum required distributions for 401k's and IRA's are mandatory at age 70 1/2 or later if you are still working.

[EdwinSm]

Many pages back on this thread (and sorry for the delay in reply) Dissident posted a link to a "simple" explanation of Velocity of Money:-

https://www.joshuakennon.com/the-velocity-of-money-for-beginners/

An interesting read, but one very worrying assumption was made:- That is if the government taxes any thing then that tax money is totally removed from circulation. That is the the conclusion one can make from the worked examples of tax in two mythical towns. The total removal of any tax money from the calculation implies that the government never spends any money . Most western governments that I know of spend more money than they collect in tax, so one must assume that any tax income is quickly returned to the general circulation of money.

[donstewart]

Debt; Thermodynamics; Supply and Demand; Value

There are roughly two ways to go about scientific explanations. The first is to derive first principles and then predict the future. Weather forecasts are like that. Chemistry is like that. And so forth. The second method is to observe a situation and try to figure out some rational explanation for it. Let’s try to apply that second method, very briefly and very roughly.

What we see when we look around the world is:
*Continued implementation on a massive scale of the information and communications technologies which were invented during the 20th century.
*Continued evolution in materials science.
*Very slow, or non-existent, growth in the OECD countries.
*Increasing debt levels almost world-wide
*Stagnant or falling wages for the bottom 90 percent in the OECD countries
*Insane accumulations of wealth by a handful of people
*Political instability everywhere
*Carbon dioxide in the air marches upward relentlessly
*Oil companies are now at zero return on capital. (Footnote 1)
*Private automobiles are thermodynamically very inefficient, leaving no surplus energy (Footnote 2). Private automobiles may be an energy sink with no net work done, as well as the source of CO2 pollution.

There seem to me to be four broad ways to approach explaining the situation. First, some people will be drawn to Econ 101 explanations….just be patient, supply and demand takes care of all problems. A variant of supply and demand is the Constructal Law of Adrian Bejan…whatever flows evolves in the direction of easier flow. Second, some people will be drawn to political explanations….it’s all because of Russian hacking or male dominance or systemic racism. The third line of thinking is denial…CO2 will just free up the Arctic for navigation and finding more oil…the Shale Revolution is on the verge of giving us decades or even a century more oil…smart phones can fix everything.

The fourth line of thinking is thermodynamic depletion of primary energy sources coupled with lack of suitable alternatives. For the last few decades, the dominant narrative has been that CO2 is something for our children or grandchildren to worry about, that technology will produce more oil and gas at reasonable prices, and that energy is not all that important in terms of enabling work that other people are actually willing to pay for…the information technology revolution, we will all just sit at desks manipulating dots on screens. I don’t know of anyone who has put together a useful model of an economy which is reliant on both primary energy and also information. Howard Odum, two decades ago, thought that information was just a form of energy, and so his college professors were extraordinarily expensive in terms of energy. I am not aware of anyone who has really delved into this in more recent times. Carey King, at the U of Texas, has derived a ratio of output to energy input of 17 to 1 for advanced economies. Does that work in reverse also...the reduction of one unit of energy costs 17 times as much for the general economy? Conservative think tanks point out that the revenue per employee of oil companies is extraordinarily high, while revenue per employee of solar PV companies is very low…other things being equal, the value being created by the solar workers is a lot less than the oil company workers. Of course, we should always be skeptical of anything put out by agenda-driven think tanks, but I agree that we really don’t have a very good understanding of just how energy and information work together to create value.

So if value creation is not humming right along (as we see from the environmental scan), then perhaps something is wrong with the thermodynamics of our primary energy sources? It would be hard to argue that lagging information and communications technology is the culprit.

Don Stewart
Footnote 1: See Art Berman slide deck at
http://www.artberman.com/macrovoices-ar ... l-special/
The return on capital chart is near the end of the deck.
Footnote 2: From Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken, page 149. ‘Only 21 percent of a petrol car’s energy consumption propels it forward, on average. Of the resulting force, 95 percent powers the car, not the driver. In essence, 99 percent of the energy used in a car is waste. It moves three thousand pounds of steel, glass, copper, and plastic in order to move a 150 pound human being.’ I will add that Hawken’s numbers are from the pump. The primary energy consumed in producing the petroleum products is not reflected in his numbers. As compared to the potential energy present in a crude oil reservoir, the amount of work being done directly on the humans is miniscule.

[vtsnowedin]

@ donstewart
Your car numbers are a joke. The average American car is driven 15,000 miles a year taking the driver and his cargo where he wants to go for the money and fuel use it consumes. In that sense it is one hundred percent efficient.
That you do not understand the utility of automobiles makes the rest of your rant not worth considering.

[donstewart]

@vtsnowedin
And Elon Musk wants to live on Mars. I suppose you think that is 100 percent efficient because that is what he wants to do.
Don Stewart

[AdamB]

Don Stewart
Footnote 1: See Art Berman slide deck at
http://www.artberman.com/macrovoices-ar ... l-special/

A single bad reference can invalidate an entire scientific article. Among those who haven't done such work, but who have been told about the lack of quality of a particular source, it just proves that they can't be bothered to learn...anything.

[AdamB]

@ donstewart
Your car numbers are a joke. The average American car is driven 15,000 miles a year taking the driver and his cargo where he wants to go for the money and fuel use it consumes. In that sense it is one hundred percent efficient.
That you do not understand the utility of automobiles makes the rest of your rant not worth considering.

His constant use of discredited references doesn't help either. Whatever logic he is using doesn't appear to be a learned thing, and voluminous cutting and pasting is some sort of tell as well. Over the years I have noticed that people who can't think for themselves (ralfy is a great example of this) will provide a reference (or cut and paste some huge amount of text) and then say "see! It says there is going to be doom!!". And that isn't what it says, it says that the US is borrowing more money than before, or car sales are down, or whatever. It seems to be designed to avoid them proving, through their own words, what they really DO understand...which as best I can tell might be...nothing. Hence the need for the cutting and pasting and wild claim in the first place.

[vtsnowedin]

@vtsnowedin
And Elon Musk wants to live on Mars. I suppose you think that is 100 percent efficient because that is what he wants to do.
Don Stewart

Elon Musk has not gotten to Mars. The American driver successfully drives the miles he chooses. It is not the wanting to go, it is the actually getting there.

[donstewart]

@vtsnowedin
The whole thrust of Paul Hawken's project is that humans can accomplish some fundamental goals using better methods than we use at the present time. Increased thermodynamic efficiency is one of the criteria, along with lessened pollution.

Taking the position you do simply excludes you from the conversation.

Don Stewart

[vtsnowedin]

@vtsnowedin
The whole thrust of Paul Hawken's project is that humans can accomplish some fundamental goals using better methods than we use at the present time. Increased thermodynamic efficiency is one of the criteria, along with lessened pollution.

Taking the position you do simply excludes you from the conversation.

Don Stewart

Who in the bleemin world is Paul Hawkins and what does he have to do with supply levels at refineries?
And of course we will move to better and more efficient methods in the future as it is an ongoing process. Pointing out a flaw in your argument is not staking out a position.

[onlooker]

Don, great post your last one. To me, it is obvious that the most profound and revealing study of the trajectory of Civilization is one that accounts for the energy balance equation or thermodynamics of said Civilization and by extension the ability of said Civilization to function and/or thrive. Since, you have consistently provided high quality references and links, I am curious about whether you can provide us with something on the following query: Has any recent scholarly or academic work/study surfaced as to the capacity of the US and/or the World to transition to a steady state regenerative sustainable society? Certainly, information abounds on different aspects of this question. But I am not aware of a comprehensive singular work or study. It would be interesting to note as I believe I have now informed myself sufficiently of the holistic panorama of all the factors necessary to create and maintain a sustainable society. The interplay between energy and population levels seems to be a critical factor to account for. In that sense your links are quite timely and important in understanding the underlying energetic requisites to keep a modern or semi-modern civilization functioning. Thank you beforehand, Don.