I'm going to be on Carl Etnier's Radio show tomorrow at ~1 EST. Pretty sharp guy given the quality of his writing.
Carl Etnier, director of Peak Oil Awareness, blogs at vtcommons.org/blog and hosts radio shows on WGDR, 91.1 FM Plainfield and WDEV 96.1 FM/550 AM, Waterbury.
Both appear to have live streams.
Excellent program on "This American Life"
Interesting. Nearly a 4x pricing increase in two years:
The general manager of distributor AG Plus, Matt Henry, said its two main fertilisers, MAP or monammonium phosphate and DAP or diammonium phosphate, were worth between $420 and $450 a tonne two years ago. "Then last year they got as high as $780 to $800 a tonne," he said. The price is now above $1400 a tonne.
Wonder if these new numbers are factored into the ROI of biofuels. ;->
OTF:
But here's the golden hope: the first one(s) to figure out how to do this, how to make suburbia sustainable and to do so at a breathtakingly low cost, will win the world. Because, as much as China and India and South Africa and Brazil are hot to get their hands on their local iterations of the 1950s American Dream -- a house, two giant cars, and a TV in every pot -- they'll be desperate to figure out how to afford it pretty damn soon. They'll be looking for this same elusive model, and will pay well for it.
This is good too:
The bright green mantra, when it comes to the built environment, is that cities rule, suburbs drool. Cities are more (energy) sustainable, resilient, cultural, diverse, better for your waistline, surprise you with presents on your birthday, and so forth. Suburbs, conversely, are bastions of excessive consumption and insufficient sophistication, filled with McMansions and McDonalds, and are probably hitting on your spouse behind your back.
The problem with cities is that they assume inexpensive industrial agriculture and functional supply chains. They also don't degrade nicely, particularly if the security model changes -- downside risk includes feral outcomes.
Letters listing millions of Social Security “no-match” workers are ready to mail to employers.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency personnel are trained and ready. Buses and vans are standing by for raids. Detention facilities have expanded.
All that is lacking is clearance from the courts.
One of the companies I founded is going public. Here's the global network my tech team and I designed and built that's now powering the company forward:
Some data-points on why it succeeded: it was the first real-time system built on a global scale. We also built it so that its operating costs were 1/5 that of our competitors.
The new global epicenter of consumption:
Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that the Gulf countries - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - are spending $230 billion annually on new hospitals, airports, railroads and power plants. That is nearly three times the $83 billion the countries were spending five years ago. The region ''is on steroids,'' says Jean-Francois Seznec, a Georgetown University Arab studies professor and consultant.
DIY instructions for the coordination kit.
Derek Curry provided me with an excellent pointer to the Peace Corp's "Remote Areas Development Manual" IS this ever going to be published as a text based PDF?
Chicago Trib. Classic example of how a HOT system breaks down:
Yet for all those profound concerns, the government reported last week a net drop in the measure of inflation most closely watched by the Federal Reserve, leaving people to wonder how that number can be falling when everything from a tank of gas to hamburger meat is sky-high. In fact, the official view of inflation for years has taken little account of food and energy prices, which are thought to go up and down with no lasting impact.But evidence is growing that these basics could be elevated for years to come, and the "core" inflation rate—minus food and energy—is telling only part of the story.
"It is reassuring to have the core index tame, but you can't eat on the core index. You can't drive on the core index," said Bill Hummer, chief economist at Wayne Hummer Investments in Chicago. "You can't ignore what's going on in food and energy."
As if the Fed had tools that could actually slow commodity price inflation driven by a global economy. This is where monetarist policy breaks down.
"I worked hard for this watch. I'm middle-class, not poor. I can't believe I have to do this to buy gas." Pawn shop customer.
"People are cleaning out their houses of gold, silver, whatever, to get money just to fill their cars with gas," said Nat Leonard, 51, whose grandfather opened Society Hill (a pawn shop) in 1929. "People are pawning out like crazy."
"I've got business owners coming in to pawn things just to make their payrolls," Leonard said, incredulous. "I've never seen that before."
We never saw so many people in here 30 and younger"
Lichtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and Mount Athos.
From the BDI.
Cantarell's rapid post-peak decline is driving this (a little over 30% of the fields oil is proving recoverable).
Naked Capitalism has an excellent post on the mindset of the predators of the American financial system.
The more I dig into Lovins material, the more his approach doesn't make sense. Sure, there are some cool ideas, but the macro case doesn't work. Perhaps I'll change my mind, but...
Zenpundit hits on the reason why the American academic establishment has such a problem understanding warfare.
One of the easiest ways to generate high quality decision making is to tap into the vast quantities of open source data and contacts available on the topic you are focused on. Despite the simplicity of this approach, the efforts to date have been few and far between.
Case in point: Michael Tanji believes that nothing much has changed since Robert Steele pwned of the CIA in the mid 90's.
The simple fact is that it is so much easier to acquire data and build systems that automate it today than it was in the mid-90's. Last year, my team built a system that automated this for the DoD. It took vast heaps of data, from corporate to NGO to terrorist to demographics to etc. and made it available in an easy to use Web application framework (with all of the visualization and social software necessary to use it).
Everyone that saw it said they loved it, needed it. Nobody knew how to fund the full realization of the system even thought the cost was nominal (short dollars). Reason: too many big contractors charging tens of millions of $$ for propriety versions of slices of our system's functionality.
It's a great example of how macro fixes to our big problems can't even get out of the lab before they are squashed.
Don Vandergriff has a blog that is exploring adaptive leadership.
Personally if I was a CXO again, instead of spending money on relatively useless corporate retreats that focus on fluffy "team building" concepts, I'd send my people to train with Don. Adaptive leadership is perhaps the best hedge against failure in a rapidly moving and highly competitive global economic system.
Here's some from Clay Shirky. Clay and many of the Web 2.0 crowd are clearly smart, but what they do is far removed from the current focal point of global change. As a result, indulging in clever Web 2.0 thinking is akin to eating intellectual fast food, it satisfies but its clearly not good for you.
This is why I bailed on thinking about techy topics after helping to get blogs (which turned into Web 2.0 later) going back in 2001/2002. The most important global changes are going on is much deeper in the stack now.
Chet and Rob are looking for a sign of interest to do a conference in September on PEI, Canada. The main thrust of the unconference is going be on Boyd's thinking and 4GW/OSW etc. A couple of dozen people. Very intense and fast moving.
Both Chet and Rob have also expressed interest in exploring the RC (resilient community). I'd like to do that and I'm going to attend. I have lots of deep, fresh analysis/synthesis to share on the RC that is sure to get all the minds that are interested humming. Personally, the RC may be the most important thing I've ever worked on.
Nothing but praise for Techsuperpowers (in Boston) for how easy they made the entire warranty fix to my powerbook. I dropped it off at their Internet cafe (long hours of operation, for easy drop off) in the morning. They called me later to talk through what was wrong. They concurred and sent it to Apple. Three days later it was back with a new screen, new speakers, new smartdrive, and a new powercable. Cost=$0. They even offered to make a second backup of my data for free while it was being fixed in case the drive was wiped by Apple's folks.
Financial Times. Here's a quote for those that think there is excess production out there:
Opec’s president on Monday warned oil prices could hit $200 a barrel and there would be little the cartel could do to help. The comments made by Chakib Khelil, Algeria’s energy minister, came as oil prices hit a historic peak close to $120 a barrel, putting further pressure on global economies.
More from the NYTimes on production (market failure?):
“What is disturbing here is that things seem to get worse, not better,” an analyst at Goldman Sachs, David Greely, said. “These high prices are not attracting meaningful new supplies."
My son and his team easily won the Massachusetts state championships for the academic decathlon (the premiere scholastic competition in the nation for high school students) last month. He's off to the national championship in CA tomorrow (they won seventh place last year). Given his personal performance so far, he's likely to get bronze medals in a couple of the subject areas.
Never thought I would see this:
Channel NewsAsia: Singapore's government is distributing cash and food vouchers to its citizens as part of fiscal measures to boost the economy and ease the burden of rising prices.
Recycling cell phones (this has been around for a while), but the logic will spread.
I've never been a fan of recycling plastics. The idea of chopping up those long polymer chains and destroying their value forever was a big mistake. Better to store them intact until we developed the technology to extract them intact. Of course, that type of logic would require a different approach to garbage. In short, a view that when you build a garbage dump, you are creating gold mine for the future.
Too bad this movie isn't out in DVD yet. One of the best sci-fi movies I've seen. Thomas Scalzo thinks so too.
Lots of interesting developments as foreclosures gut a community (examples from the WP):
The rate of increase exceeds the capability to police it:
In Prince William, police said real estate agents have been calling stations to ask that officers watch for trespassing at houses they are marketing. The Circuit Court recorded 3,344 foreclosures (a number that includes foreclosures in the city of Manassas and Manassas Park) last year, up from 282 in 2006.
Crime: When foreclosures rise, crime often follows, researchers said. A 2005 study by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Woodstock Institute found that, holding other factors constant, each foreclosure in a 100-house neighborhood corresponded to a 2.4 percent jump in violent crime.
Bandos: ...a 27-year-old woman was arrested by Loudoun County sheriff's deputies after she, her husband and two children moved into a foreclosed house in Ashburn and allegedly tried to use forged documents to convince officers that she was the new owner, officials said.
Vandos owners: "People are angry," Loudoun Sheriff Steve O. Simpson said. "And our deputies who go to these houses to serve evictions find that people have stripped their houses of toilets and stoves and refrigerators." At the Lucketts property, deputies found that the hardwood floors also had been stripped.
TAZ (temporary autonomous zone) development within communities: In Modesto, Calif., police said marijuana is being grown in the yards of vacant houses. In Atlanta, police are compiling lists of vacancies, where drug use, prostitution and squatting are becoming more common, a police spokesman said. In the Tampa area, the Hillsborough County sheriff's office has assigned a detective to specialize in metal theft, a response to a spike in copper tubing, air conditioners and other appliances being stolen from vacant houses.
Pleas to respect the ownership of the banks/servicers/vulture funds, essentially rentiers of all sorts (LOL, good luck with that):
"Is it OK to 'hang out' in a house or building that is vacant . . . ?" the flier asks. "NO," it answers. "Even if no one is living in the house, someone still owns the house/building and you would be committing a crime. . . . Think twice before entering a vacant building
Rapid market movement in a tightly coupled global economic system can suck a country dry of a commodity (the typical mechanism is push, this is pull). No resource wars (which is a foolish concept), just market-induced disruption:
"Japan, the Philippines, [South] Korea, Taiwan -- they all came in with huge orders, and no matter how high prices go, they keep on buying," said Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade and also an independent trader. Grains have surged so high, he said, that some traders are walking off the floor for weeks at a time, unable to handle the stress. "We have never seen anything like this before," Voge said. "Prices are going up more in one day than they have during entire years in the past. But no matter the price, there always seems to be a buyer. . . . This isn't just any commodity. It is food, and people need to eat."
Very cool terminology from Calculated Risk. Given the rapidly growing number of abandoned homes, it is inevitable that it would have a substantial social impact. Hence the development of new language to reflect this:
Bandos - squatters in abandoned homes.
Vandos - vandals that damage abandoned homes.
John Goekler has a well written article on Iraq in Counter-Punch. I get the feeling he is going to like my next book on "Resilient Communities" too (maybe even more).
Interesting. The Army War College invited me to a seminar. Going to be doing some panel work with Nagl and Scheuer.
Rice is one of the more energy intensive crops. Note the five-fold price increase over the last five years.
NOTE: Typical behavior across agricultural production is to squeeze efficiencies out until about $75 a barrel. After that point, the efficiency measures yield very little (although its possible to extend this a bit by burning the productivity of your soil). Also, after $75 a barrel agricultural production gets capital intensive. Costs increase linearly with energy price increases. In sum, if you don't have the cash, you don't produce.
The fat guy thinks I am a peak oil shill. Hmmm. Personally, I'm just asking the question of what happens when a "free" energy input becomes expensive. There shouldn't be much debate over asking that question now that oil is trading at 4x what it was 5 years ago.
Unable to muster the financial resources and the requisite competence necessary to implement fingerprinting (via USVISIT) of people leaving the US, the DHS is attempting to require a nearly bankrupt industry to foot the bill for designing and implementing a system. Classic end game failures like this are multiplying.
Some personal fabrication plus this simple solar design that cuts down on complex components might be great for the RC on an open source basis.
Check out this chart on Notices of Default. 2/3rds of these are likely to end up foreclosure. This is going to be very ugly.
One thread on the start of the RC trend line. Backyard farming in the WSJ this morning:
Start-up costs for a one-eighth-acre farm run about $5,500, says Ms. Christensen of Spin-Farming. That includes a walk-in cooler to wash and store fresh produce, a rotary tiller and a farm-stand display. Annual operating expenses, including seeds and farmers-market stall fees, can add about $2,000. Such a farm can generate $10,000 to $20,000 in annual sales, she says. That's "an entry point into farming to see if they have a talent for it," Ms. Christensen says. "Those that do will eventually be able to expand and increase that income level quite substantially."Susan and Greg VanHecke (a Navy Officer) planted a small, 6-foot-by-20-foot vegetable garden in the back of their house in Norfolk, Va., two years ago to help teach their two children to grow and eat more vegetables. Reaping a bumper crop last year, Mr. VanHecke asked the owner of a local restaurant called Stove for whom he once worked as a sous-chef, to buy vegetables. Soon, Mr. VanHecke was making weekly deliveries to the restaurant, averaging about $100 in sales per week. The VanHeckes have added another restaurant customer this year and are tearing up all their backyard flower beds to grow more vegetables.
Has anyone found an excellent resource that establishes the correlation and sensitivity between energy prices and agricultural costs?
To decentralize it. Excellent.
Anyone know of a CHP (combined heat power) wood/biomass pellet system for the home?
Russian oil production slumped (Q1 2008) for the first time in a decade. Follow this with this from a story in the restricted Financial Times:
Leonid Fedun, the 52-year-old vice-president of Lukoil, Russia’s largest independent oil company, told the Financial Times he believed last year’s Russian oil production of about 10m barrels a day was the highest he would see “in his lifetime”. Russia is the world’s second biggest oil producer.
Mr Fedun compared Russia with the North Sea and Mexico, where oil production is declining dramatically, saying that in the oil-rich region of western Siberia, the mainstay of Russian output, “the period of intense oil production [growth] is over”.
_________________
Should be sobering given the scale of the potential declines, but like the debates over global warming, there is no amount of evidence sufficient for those that can't wrap their head around it. Markets are neither infallible nor omnipotent. They aren't a terrestrial manifestation of God. They are just complex man-made systems that can fail spectacularly.
I have a bunch of posts up on global guerrillas focused on resilient communities (many, many more enroute). Here's a handy link that puts all of these posts in a single category.
Ed Beakley over at Project Whitehorse has a new issue of his e-zine up on the topic of resilient communities. Worth a read.
Bruce Sterling, my favorite sf writer of all time, jams my post on DIY Rockets.
(((Y'know, I write for MAKE magazine and know a lot of open-source guys, so I can think of about fifty reasons why backyard rockets made by amateurs are not the future of defense contracting. It's rather like alleging that home-spun, home-tailored uniforms are the future of military couture.)))
I wrote him a short reply (slightly edited):
>>I'm pretty sure I'm not implying that first world conventional militaries and their contractors are going to adopt DIY tech. However, I believe that the vast majority of death produced in warfare during the 21st century will be from DIY weapons.
>>As with IEDs, DIY Rockets are going to see substantial improvement in design/accuracy/lethality over the next decade. First world militaries may end focusing most of their design efforts on anti-weapons.
Rob Paterson has an excellent post on the necessity of food security in a over specialized world:
READ MY LIPS - there is no future is aiming for a global food market in meat of fries. There is however a local market that will be more secure. Part of what we have to do is to accept this and to then design a string local system that will connect growers to buyers and make it easy for both.
Elizabeth Warren over at Credit Slips has the answer to what happens when you intentionally damage the middle class to expand the opportunity space for rentiers (as opposed to entrepreneurs):
Hanging the worldwide economic recovery on reigniting consumer spending is like investing in used fireworks.How are Americans planning to spend their stimulus checks? According to a new poll, fully 41% say they will use their rebates to pay down debts. Another 19% are trying to protect themselves by saving it, so that 60% have no spending plans at all. Only 7% describe new spending. Debt is blocking a large part of any impact the stimulus package might have had
Sure.
Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to work out their negative emotions. He might have added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.
As soon as I think Obama's pandering too much on economics, he says something this blunt and wise. Of course people get nasty and scared and cling to old shibboleths when they're feeling vulnerable on economics! That's the entire history of our country.
This, plus the long term decline in the median wage (as well as the decline of the percentage of those even at median), is one of the best indicators I've found that the entire US economy is fundamentally broken.
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