Peak Oil News and Message Boards

ElijahJones wrote:We want this system to have an equilibrium at D=S. To do that either k[2] =P and k[3]=1/P giving

P'=k[1](D-S)
D'= S
S'= D

Or k[2] and k[3] are function of P (at least) such that

limit (D-S->0, k[2] = P)
limit(D-S->0, k[3] = 1/P)

Each year the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) produces forecasts of U.S. oil and gas production in its Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), which is widely viewed as an authoritative assessment of what to expect for future U.S. oil and gas output (the EIA prefers the term “projection” to “forecast”). The EIA’s reference case is considered as the most likely scenario by industry, policy makers, and the media. Considering that AEO reference case forecasts for shale gas and tight oil production in recent releases are remarkably optimistic when considered at the play-level in terms of well productivity, decline rates and prospective areas, I find this baffling and worrisome. It’s one thing for industry to paint a rosy picture of future production, but something altogether different when a government agency—tasked with providing the American public with objective information—does it. AEO2018, for example, projects that

AdamB wrote:Interesting that in his anti-EIA pronouncements, David doesn't notice that the last graph presented appears to track pretty closely the USGS estimate for the Wolfcamp shale in the Midland basin. And then David presents no geologic information to refute what appears to be the EIA using the best geologic information available to base their estimates upon?

Most economic forecasts have a big blind spot: Climate change

Heat waves that ground airplanes. Rising seas that drown waterfronts. Wildfires that consume whole cities and blanket the West Coast in smoke.

Climate change is having a real impact, not just on the environment but on the economy too. And a growing body of research by economists and climate scientists shows that extreme weather will weigh on economic growth even more so in the future. But almost no mainstream economic forecasting model takes that into account, in an omission that some economists say could affect the accuracy of economic predictions going forward.

The most recent study to quantify the economic impact of the carbon emissions that spur climate change was featured last week in a brief by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. By evaluating the performance of state economies in previous years, the report found that every one degree increase in average summer temperatures decreases annual state-level output growth by between 0.15 and 0.25 percentage points. ....

...... "Every analysis that's been done of this shows that action is far cheaper than inaction, and there's a global clean energy race that we are currently losing, and that's bad for our economy," Hassol says. "We've got to break this out of the environmental and science box, because I think it's first and foremost an economic story."

The Obama administration had made strides in connecting climate to the economy, issuing a number of reports and also refining a metric called the "social cost of carbon," which was used in tallying the costs and benefits of proposed regulations. The Government Accountability Office, which answers to Congress, continues to warn about the risk climate change poses to federal revenues.

But climate work has mostly ceased under the Trump administration, which last year disbanded a group that calculated the social cost of carbon, and archived the Environmental Protection Agency's web page on the subject.

Nevertheless, research on the connection between climate and the economy is advancing in a surprising place: The private sector. Insurance companies, for example, increasingly integrate climate projections into their coverage offerings. Hundreds of large global companies have signed on to an effort to incorporate climate exposure into financial disclosures. ....

more: https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/17/news/e ... index.html

Tanada wrote: ......

Basically I am saying if insurance companies stop encouraging people to live in stupid locations like on hills that slide in wet weather and deserts that require massive irrigation and hills where wild brush grows thick enough to make massive fires every decade or so we will all be much better off.

The Biggert–Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 (Biggert-Waters) modified the NFIP. At the conclusion of 2011, as Congress passed Biggert-Waters, the NFIP cumulative debt was over $17 billion.[8] A core principle of Biggert-Waters was to change the NFIP premiums to match actuarial risk-based premiums that better reflected the expected losses and real risk of flooding. These changes included removing discounts to many policies which were being sold below actual actuarial risk targets and eliminating "grandfathering" of older rates.[8][9]

In January 2014, the United States Senate passed the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014. This bill changed the process used to alter subsidized premiums and reinstated grandfathering of lower rates; effectively delaying the increases in flood insurance premiums to obtain risk-based premiums under Biggert-Waters and spreading the cost of the lost premiums over all of the remaining policy holders.[8][10][11]

The National Flood Insurance Program was $24 billion in debt at the beginning of 2014 as a result of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Sandy. The passage of the HFIAA described above has concerned insurance and environmental observers that the delay in implementation of actuarial rates will leave taxpayers exposed to additional losses.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... ce_Program