We need to learn quickly to keep up with the massive change around us so we don't get run over. We need to outrun change.
Eagle Ford Shale blog has a graph of oil production in Texas over the last 30 years – Texas Oil Production Surpassed 1988 Levels in September 2012. Looks like a near straight-line up since the first of 2011.
Continue reading “Texas oil production highest level in 25 years”
Wow. If you want to keep up with the rapid change around us, you really need to keep an eye on The Economist. I’ll have 2 posts and a comment in another post based on ideas in this week’s edition.
Magazine cover has four deep-sea monster squids fighting each other. Nearby is a bathysphere with two little people watching the battle. Labels identify the giants of the deep as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.
KFYR-TV in Bismark has the report: Williston Airport Breaks Record.
It is about a month that United and Delta have been flying into Williston. The article reports 5,000 passengers through the airport in November. That is the record, surpassing the previous record of 2,000.
Continue reading “Record passengers at Williston airport after Delta and United flights begin”
Sometimes the change around us is grim, like having nine countries with nukes.
When the world had the U.S. and Soviet Union staring at each other with nuclear weapons, we focused clearly on the implications. Since the fall of the Soviet Union (which reduced the nuclear war risk, the conventional war risk, and the overall level of suffering & misery around the world) we’ve spent less time thinking about how nukes affect everything else.
That is a mistake, thinks Paul Bracken, in The Second Nuclear Age.
Continue reading “Another change around us that we ought to ponder is nuclear proliferation”
Bruce Oskol, writing at Million Dollar Way, gives some background why he started that blog:
Again, one of several reasons for starting the blog a couple years ago was to counter the naysayers.
The original naysayers doubted the Bakken even existed — hard to believe, I know; and then, when the numbers started coming out of the Bakken, the naysayers said the Bakken was good for North Dakota but that was about it.
I particularly enjoy citing this post from another blog as an example: “Don’t believe it. There’s some oil to be gotten out of Bakken, and it’s going to be exploited. But the “bonanza” is nothing but hype.” — June 25, 2010.
“Some oil to be gotten out of the Bakken … Nothing but hype.” Wow.
I checked on the link and found Bakken Oil Hype at The American West at Risk blog.
Wow is right.
Here’s the arrangement the Pilgrims used when they first landed:
“Although they planted household gardens almost from the start, they collectivized initial field and livestock operations. The settlers had some agricultural successes, but they were unable to grow corn in their common field. Within six months of reaching Plymouth, almost one-half of the population had perished from disease.
That’s a quote from Professor Robert Ellickson in Prof. Don Boudreaux’s article The Pilgrims’ economic progress.
A collectivized farming system didn’t work too well. Starvation was the result.
So, they changed their plans:
Continue reading “Under what economic model did the pilgrims almost starve? What different economic model allowed them to thrive?”
Café Hayek takes a leisurely tour though his newly acquired copy of the 1956 Fall/Winter Sears catalog and shares the preliminary results in The Future: Back to the Past.
Maybe things weren’t so great in the good ol’ days.
Continue reading “Hours of labor to buy basic home appliances – 1956 and 2012”
There is radical change taking place in the education world. Where will it go? How will we handle on-line cheating? What’s the credential going to look like?
Nobody knows. And that’s okay.
Huh? That’s okay?
Yeah. Continue reading ““Top of the first inning” in education reform”
Carpe Diem points to three places to find old catalogs on-line: Vintage catalogs back to 1933 now available online
Radio Shack Catalogs has two sets available:
So what can you do with these old catalogs? Consider this:
I make it a high priority to avoid corrosive humor, such as sarcasm or ridicule, in my writing. But when it comes to the foolish Peak Oil concept, laughter seems to be the only appropriate response.
factual background
In a 1949 article, Dr. M. King Hubbert was able to calculate the total amount of oil that exists on the earth. Don’t take my word for it. See page 105 of “Energy from Fossil Fuels, Science” [scanned, 260 kb]. Won’t link to any specifics, but the ability he had to calculate the total amount of oil that will ever be known is a skill still present today.
Continue reading “Three of the six biggest oil fields ever found cannot exist – Peak Oil #13”
On my other blog, Nonprofit Update, I have a post describing an essay that talks about the wild swings between optimism and pessimism of our perceptions about what is taking place in Africa. The underlying circumstances can feed either optimism or pessimism as you choose.
If we want to understand, we need to go beyond our mood swings and learn of the complexity that exists.
Why mention that post on this blog? Because it addresses at a deep level how we can deal with the change surrounding us. We need to go beyond our emotions and look at the underlying complexity.
Why post it on that blog? Because the main focus is an encouragement to address the unseen complexity in order to create change in the place where an NPO is working.
Check out It’s complicated, Africa version.
Here’s RBN Energy’s estimate for hitting 1M bopd, in their 11-19-12 blog post, From a Famine of Pipeline to a Feast of Rail – Giving Thanks for Bakken Delivery. The post graphs N.D. production by month and then adds a trend line:
Continue reading “RBN’s estimate on when Bakken production passes 1 million barrels a day”
(Cross-post from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)
Last week I published my 1,000th unique post.
I suppose that’s not a big deal in the vast blogosphere, but still seems like a cool accomplishment.
Thanks to everyone who has stopped by to check out my blogs.
Why mention unique posts?
Pipelines take a long time to build. The rapid increase in oil coming out of the ground in North Dakota was leaving producers worried. How could they get all that oil to market? There was so much oil going through the existing pipeline to one location (Cushing) that there was a big discount on that oil.
People who wanted to make a buck stepped in. There’s now enough capacity to get all the oil to market and the discount for Bakken crude is gone.
That’s my summary of RBN Energy’s post, From a Famine of Pipeline to a Feast of Rail – Giving Thanks for Bakken Delivery.
Update: This is part 12 of my Peak Oil series.)
An article in Business Insider suggests There Is A Shale Oil Field Under Santa Barbara Four-Times Bigger Than The Bakken.
The article cites without linking (and I don’t want to spend the time finding the source) an EIA analysis:
According to the EIA, the Monterey Formation, which covers an enormous chunk of Southern California and terminates near Santa Barbara, has 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable crude — four times as much as the Bakken formation in North Dakota.
Continue reading “We don’t have to prosper, California edition”