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Continue reading Links for the week of August 28th, 2009
Tag: oil
Links for the week of August 20th, 2009
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of August 20th, 2009
Georgia and Russia, sittin’ in a tree
Pravda has put out a helpful timeline of the current Georgia-Russia conflict
Maybe I have a one track mind but, I don’t think this kind of conflict often erupts for purely egotistic political reasons. There’s a lot of energy backstory that isn’t being told in that Russian chronicle, such as the sabotage by someone of natural gas and electricity supplies headed into Georgia from Russia (gee, I wonder who it could have been… in the depths of a Caucasian winter in January 2006), the subsequent commissioning of the South Caucasus gas pipeline in December 2006, and all of the wrangling that’s been going on over the trans-Caspian gas pipeline since the mid 90s (Russian and Iran don’t want it, everyone else does, because Russian and Iran have gas already, and everyone else gets their gas from them).
Perhaps the largest diplomatic stick Russia can wield today is its oil and gas reserves (assuming they don’t want to actually like, invade a NATO country, or shoot off some plutonium fireworks), and they are jealously guarding the ability to wield that stick. Georgia has successfully circumvented them with the pipeline from Baku to Turkey (and eventually on to Europe), and I think in part now, they’re paying the price, so that others in central Asia with gas they’d like to independently pipe out of the region, including, perhaps most importantly, Iran, think twice about setting up their own circumvention. For instance, Iran built a pipeline into Armenia. It was supposed to be extendable, eventually onward to Turkey and Europe. Before it was built, Gazprom bought a controlling interest in the pipeline company, and summarily reduced the diameter of the pipeline from 1.4m to 0.7m, making it unable to carry enough gas for extending it to Turkey and Europe to be worthwhile.
I think that the blurring, or erasure, of the lines separating nations and corporations is interesting, and at least somewhat unexplored. (Maybe one major difference is that a nation-corp can more dependably rely on its nation’s armed forces to step in occasionally. Though, historically, US companies have had a pretty good chance of getting help on demand, at least in Latin America). We wouldn’t be surprised if Exxon did something like buy up a potential competitor, but when a nation does it, how do we react? In oil and gas, all of the major players are nation-corps. I think this is actually one of many very good reasons for the industrialized world (that, by and large, has used up its oil and gas) to invest heavily in renewable alternatives to oil and gas. If we develop renewables for national security (and environmental) reasons, the costs may well be reduced enough that other economies can use them simply because they’re cheap, distributed (more difficult to sabotage than a pipeline or LNG terminal), and don’t require you to be on good terms with Russia, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela, or get permission from the IAEA to spin up your centrifuges.
Pipelines are beasts curiously subject to consensus, because they are so easy to destroy. If anybody in the area doesn’t want one to function, it doesn’t. So Russia may well be able to maintain its pre-eminent position as gas supplier to Europe for a long while to come, and keep the squeeze on in central asia indefinitely. At least, until we stop relying on natural gas. Or until someone in central asia really decides it doesn’t want Russia’s natural gas infrastructure to function. Now wouldn’t that be fun for everyone!
Basic Wrenching at Caltech
We had our first Basic Wrenching class yesterday at the Caltech Bike Shop. I think it went pretty well. Maybe a little bit chaotic, and a few too many people – but that’s okay. Someone brought chocolate chip cookies, and someone else brought chocolate banana bread! A great start!
I helped 9 people take their front wheels off, remove their tires and tubes, and then walked them through patching one of the many tubes that we had laying around at home with holes in them. Steve from Open Road graciously gave us some patch kits and chain lube and tire levers for the effort. John McKeen walked people through adjusting their brake and shifter cable tensions, and Katherine gave people bicycle anatomy walkthroughs. I think Ian kind of floated from one place to another. There were at least 20 people total. Hopefully most of them got something out of it.
The shop itself is almost completely barren – everything but the tools was jettisoned for the South Hovse remodel unfortunately, and the Moore-Hufsteadler funding hasn’t come through. They (I think rightly) pointed out that we really need to have some procedure in place to keep the tools from diffusing away. I don’t really want to call it “theft”… but when people can borrow things, they do tend to end up making a kind of random walk away. That’s just (social) entropy. But we really do need workbenches, and a couple more stands, and a big toolbox, and pegboards that haven’t had all of the tool outlines turned into phalli. So I hope we can agree on a structure that we’re willing to implement, and they this is acceptable.
There’s lots of room in the “rafters” of the shop to hang bikes, if we can get some hooks and cables set up somehow, safely. I think it would be great if we could operate like the Bike Oven, letting people work on abandoned bikes we get from Security, and then buy them for cheap. And it would be nice if we could have a selection of patch kits, tubes, and tire levers, that people could buy at cost (or at least cheaply).
Maybe what we really need is a separate bike shop “membership”, with a minor fee to cover consumables like oil and patches and grease and gloves, etc., and to serve as an official designation for the people who have access to the shop. Then, at least once a week, I think we should commit to having a mechanically inclined person down there willing to help anybody else out who wants to work on their bike, so that it’s a Caltech Community resource, instead of just a closed club.
I think I’ll see if I can show up (extra) early next Monday, and do a little tool organization, and make sure to bring the work stands from home, and maybe my own personal tools, since it seemed like we really were lacking some basic stuff – or it just wasn’t findable.
Congress has failed us on renewable energy again
Last week Congress left DC for its summer vacation without extending the federal tax credits for investments in renewable energy. This is an abject failure on the part of our elected representatives. Without these tax credits, the booming renewable energy industry will grind to a halt come December 31st. Already, companies like EI Solutions in Pasadena, that design and build large solar installations, have been forced to stop signing contracts for projects that cannot be completed before the end of the year. For years these tax incentives have been renewed only on an annual basis, and sometimes only at the last minute, or even retroactively, making it impossible for the industry to develop long range business plans and investments.
At the same time, we reliably subsidize the mature, well capitalized, and fabulously profitable domestic fossil fuel industries, encouraging our dependence on polluting, finite, and often foreign resources. This doesn’t make any sense, because the oil, gas, and coal companies already have they capital they need to make investments in additional production capacity, but they choose not to, and instead return their profits to their shareholders. On the other hand, tax credits for renewables currently make or break the industry.
Which should we be doing? Pouring money into the pockets of ExxonMobil shareholders, or fostering the emergence and growth of a domestic, renewable, clean, energy industry, that can provide thousands of new jobs in California. I think the choice is clear. Evidently, Congress feels otherwise. An army of lobbyists paid by the fossil fuel industry has made sure of it. We don’t have to depend on fossil fuels forever, but unless we demand change from our elected representatives, they are going to keep listening to the campaign contributions.
Too big to fail is too big, period
With the collapse of Bear Stearns and the US automakers and airlines tanking, and the prospect of a trillion dollar bailout of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and who knows how many other large lenders, all because they are, putatively, “too big to fail” (by which is meant, obviously, not that they are so large as to be incapable of failing, but that they are so large as to make the consequences of their failing worse than the immediate, visible consequences of bailing them out), I’ve started wondering if perhaps what we really need is an update to our anti-trust laws, to the effect of: if you’re too big to fail, you’re just plain too big.
Instead of allowing corporate juggernauts to form, and then eventually being “forced” to save them from their own follies, why not just keep these captains of industry small enough that we never need to save them. The Feds already have to approve the bigger mergers and acquisitions – they already have this power by-and-large. Keeping our companies a little smaller would increase competition, and diversity within the corporate ecology of our markets. GM doesn’t want to make fuel efficient cars? Fine – their small-cars division can spin off and do its own thing. Sink or swim in its competition with Toyota, while GM itself just sinks, into an ever shrinking ocean of $150 oil.
Instead, we give taxpayer cash to large companies that have made bad business decisions, and absolve them of their obligations to pay the pensions they promised to their lifelong employees. We inflate the dollar and erode both our spending power, and our savings, while simultaneously crippling the long term competitiveness of our biggest industries. I don’t think the marginal increase in productivity from economies of scale that happens between being a $20 billion company and a $40 billion company is really worth it, if it means we’re all eventually on the hook for bailing out the $40 billion company, when we wouldn’t have to shovel mountains of cash at the two $20 billion companies… one of which might actually have made some good business decisions.