When the high price of gas starts to bother me, I try to keep things in perspective. After all, I am truly a privileged person. People are being forced to go with out electricity so that I can have gas.
You see, oil is something everyone wants, but not everybody can have. So some people Click Here to continue reading.
This from The New Scientist…..
An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn’t going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn’t interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren’t prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.
The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it.
The strain has spread slowly across east Africa, but in January this year spores blew across to Yemen, and north into Sudan (see Map). Scientists who have tracked similar airborne spores in this part of the world say it will now blow into Egypt, Turkey and the Middle East, and on to India, lands where a billion people depend on wheat.
Of course to make matters worse, wheat stocks are low….
The threat couldn’t have come at a worse time. Consumption has outstripped production in six of the last seven years, and stocks are at their lowest since 1972. Wheat prices jumped 14 per cent last year.
The whole article is well worth reading.
This from the R-Squared Energy Blog…..
I don’t think I have ever seen the forecasters miss the estimate this badly. They were forecasting a 300,000 barrel decline in gasoline stocks, and instead got a 5 million barrel decline. For the first time in a long time, inventories are now in the lower half of the normal range.
Read the whole post for the details on this. But I have not seen any really good answers for why there has been a stronger than expected drop in stocks. The quick answer seems to be that the refineries are only operating at 87 percent capacity. This is a lower than people had expected. The question is why…..
M&T bank happens to be a bank that we in the Ethereal Land have some familiarity with. So it was of great interest to me to come across this post from Calculated Risk(be sure to read the comments). The post by CR called to my attention this Reuter’s news story…..
Click Here to continue reading.
If Stuart Staniford is wrong, he is making one of the most rigorous wrong arguments I have ever seen. He now has a third essay up making the case that Saudi Arabia is facing involuntary cuts in production.
You would think that his last two essays would have covered all there is to cover with currently Click Here to continue reading.
Maybe it’s just me being too tired from working to much over time, but it seems to me that Tyler is letting his emotions cloud his judgment. I just can’t think of any other reason why he would approvingly quote this on his blog…..
But remember, the tech bust devoured about $9 trillion in corporate equity; Click Here to continue reading.
This excellent little article (h/t Belmont Club) points out that things are not what they seem when it comes to calculating environmental costs.
Excerpt…
When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer – the Prius’s arch nemesis.
I have been working too much overtime to keep up with my favorite blogs. But I did manage to catch the post by Tyler Cowen on Bryan Caplan’s summarization of his next book. The post still kept my mind occupied during a long night of plowing snow. Two lines from the post in particular stuck Click Here to continue reading.
Call me ignorant, but I never understood the difference between summer gasoline and winter gasoline before. If you are as ignorant as I am, you might want to read this article by Robert Rapier over at the Oil Drum.
Before I got my job at Acme, if you had asked me what sort of interest I had in manufacturing I would have told you that I thought it would be cool to see how raw materials got transformed into finished products. I still think that’s cool and I wish I could spend time watching Click Here to continue reading.