Slashdot Mirror
Higher Oil Prices Are Starting To Bring Jobs Home
penguin_dance notes a report up at ABC News that high oil and gas prices in the US may be moving jobs back home in a trend that some economists are calling "reverse globalization." It's becoming more and more expensive to ship finished product from other countries, so some companies are moving the manufacturing back to the US. The article hints that this trend may spill over soon to raw materials such as steel. One economist is quoted: "It's not just about labor costs anymore. Distance costs money, and when you have to shift iron ore from Brazil to China and then ship it back to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is looking pretty good at 40 bucks an hour."
Actually, pittsburgh sucks. But this is a good thing, regardless.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Now if companies would pull their heads out and either/or/both go to a 4 day work week and re-implement telecommuting...
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Hopefully the oil prices will cause people to become more concerned with the environment by wasting less (because of the price) and realize that gas won't last forever and get them interested in alternative fuel sources.
If high fuel cost continues, it will only bring back the sail-boats, not the off-shore jobs.
With the high price of fuel....and everything else going up along with it..I could safely bet that the avg. person in the US does not have the environment topmost on their heads. If they could come up with cheap energy for running cars, etc...I think many people in the US would now be comfortable strip mining the Rocky Mountains and The Applachians down to nothing without a 2nd thought. This has hit the general public in a way they never really ever imagined before, and they are shocked. I'd say they'd be prepared to do about anything if the price keeps increasing at this rate.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Also, a nuclear ship can sustain high speeds much longer than conventionally-powered ships. Makes you harder to capture.
I think it might be an interesting development to bring back the "Q-ship"... troll for pirates, then blow their asses out of the water by surprise.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
It's more that the price of dollars is low than that the price of oil is high. Turning every one dollar bill into a one million dollar bill won't cure world poverty either.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
The equation is tipping back towards domestic manufacture.
Shipping costs are only one of the variables and it is inaccurate to attribute the whole shift to that.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Business cares not what the people are concerned with, it only cares about what will part them with their money.
Correct. And people only part with their money when they can obtain things that they value more than the money they part with.
What's the problem again?
This has hit the general public in a way they never really ever imagined before, and they are shocked.
They will be even more shocked when they come to realize that all of these price increases are simply a symptom of America's slip from "world superpowe" to " average wealthy western nation". Fuel and consumer products have cost this much in Europe for decades. The EU is doing just fine dealing with $5+ for a gallon of gas, and they aren't strip mining the Alps. But we can expect to have European sized cars and European sized houses at the european $3000 per sq ft not the US $125 per sq ft.
We are all just people.
I highly, highly doubt that. With the mortgage crisis here in the US home prices are falling not increasing. And I doubt that that will stop anytime soon. Another thing is, North America has only been explored within the last 500 years, it lacks the shortage of land which is part of why Europe has such high prices for houses, mix that with the fact that home prices are falling and people with a lot of land are cashing it in to get some cashflow... You get the picture. While this may make large buildings such as new arenas and skyscrapers more pricey, for the average person home prices will only keep falling.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The concept of the broken window fallacy works if there aren't any external diseconomies in play. I'd contest that in this case.
This isn't a broken window fallacy: it's simply a change in the cost of doing certain types of business. There isn't an incentive to bring, for instance, tech support from Bangalore to Pittsburgh.
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
and the convoy uses what type of fuel? pixie dust?
I don't care so much about the environment in Alaska. Well, I do, but it's not my primary concern. I'm against drilling there for other reasons. Even the highest estimates say we'll only get about a 10 dollar reduction in the price per barrel of oil. That translates to a few cents per gallon. I think the money and time are better spent trying to figure out how to get us off fossil fuels than just postponing the inevitable decline of oil. And as a bonus, all that territory in Alaska can remain untouched by man.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Really ?
Most days I part with my money because I'm trapped between two evils, and I try to pick the lesser. Telecoms, overpriced food (even staples), services done to the lowest possible standards... Greed is spiraling out of control, because those who spend wisely are impossibly outnumbered by the ravenous fools of our society.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The fact is, for all the environmentalists out there screaming to put regulations on carbon emissions, etc., the price of energy is the only thing that's going to have a substantial impact on the amount of fuel we use. People are actually considering more fuel efficient vehicles, and at my place of work people are taking advantage of opportunities to work from home once in a while. Especially when their commute is over one hour. If we keep it up, people might move closer to work.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
except globalization is the sole reason for our comfortable living status and swelled middle class. be careful what you wish for.
No, not at all. Economic dominance and a thriving manufacturing sector maintained our standard of living. The global economy did little to help that, and in fact has been much of why that vaunted standard of living has been dropping in the past few decades.
The number of people who qualify as "middle class" is also not so swelled anymore.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Umm... Most of the cost that Europeans pay for fuel is in the form of taxes, which they have voluntarily inflicted upon themselves, and not some kind of relationship to status as a world power. Oil is traded in a world market, whoever pays more gets the oil.
Also, the housing prices you linked to are in cost/square METER. Given that there are roughly ten square feet in a square meter, the costs are 2x, not 24x as you suggest.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
I say, save the oil in alaska and use it for truly priceless stuff when it runs out everywhere else.
Given all the yammering-- it's clear if oil was 300 a barrel, alaska would be covered with pipes. so we *will* drill there someday. just a question of when .
Who cares about the environment, it can recover in 20-40 years.
Real problem is still TOO MANY PEOPLE.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Not only will that kill all potential savings from going nuclear, the military ships will have to stay behind as soon as the convoy enters high the sea territory of some other country.
Not bloody likely to ever happen.
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
That is still no reason not to demand value for the value you offer. In a system where fools have no safety net, which is paid for now by those who spend wisely, we wouldn't have this problem. The greed you speak of is not capitalism. The greed you speak of is the one where people want value they have no right to, and force value from those who do have it. Whither those who hold value now have come about it 'justly' or not is of little consequence to the morality of taking it from them now. That becomes a chicken and egg argument. And also indicates that if you yourself will trade in value, instead of trying to swindle, cheat and steal, the cycle may be broken. But the theft of value has become institutionalized by the welfare state. To do the most good, where do you think think we should start then? I think the government should stop stealing from us and giving to ravenous fools, plain and simple.
Money is the root of all evil?
One important question that remains is the cost-comparison, though. Uranium is currently valued at $57 (US) per pound, for a total of $9291, in this instance. The gas-pump value of that diesel is around $116 000 000 (I don't know what cargo transport companies pay for it). In the case of the uranium, though, we're only talking about raw uranium, not fuel uranium. What is the cost of refinement into fuel form?
Yes, producing locally will be more expensive than it used to be to produce externally, and yes this will result in a higher local cost(presumably your basis for the broken window theory).
However where the broken window takes something that was fine as it was and claims that by breaking it and producing work for someone else is a good thing where it actually just creates an unnecessary cost for the baker and lowers overall productivity, this isn't the same situation.
The manufacturing work was going to be done by someone regardless, all this has done is make it more economical to do it locally. It isn't unnecessary work, or lost productivity it's simply someone else doing it.
You could argue that the increase in cost will do more overall damage to the economy than bringing the jobs back home will do good, but even that's sort of immaterial, the cost increase is going to happen pretty much no matter what we do, so our net result from this move is an increase in capital flowing into our the US economy and job creation, from the perspective of the US that's a good thing, maybe not so much a good thing for China, but still a good thing.
Already there are people complaining that 1/4 of their take-home pay is going to gas. Houses that kind of made sense at $1/gallon, just aren't worth it any more. Better to pay a bit more (you can afford it from the gas savings), live closer to work, and reap the additional benefits of more free time and less wear and tear on your car tp boot.
Even if there were no foreclosure crisis, $5/gallon gas would be lowering the value of houses that were built too far from any commercial center. This is just a happy coincidence - let the get-rich-quick house flippers, speculators, and everyone who lied on their mortgage application "because they just had to have their overpriced dream" eat shit and die. I have zero sympathy for realtwhores crying about how they're going to lose their own homes because they can't find anyone else to drink the kook-aid (no, that's not a typo - too many of them were were kooks, con artists, fraudsters, hucksters, etc. and they made the mistake of believing their own lies).
Exports will also go down.
Ask anybody in the mail order business if the ballooning shipping charges have hurt or improved sales. Same goes for food prices, or anything which needs to be moved from point A to point B.
Greed destroys itself. --And let's not make any mistakes here; the higher fuel prices are being artificially inflated. It's a short-term money grab which will of course threaten the continued health of the oil industry and many of our daily economic realities.
I'd certainly enjoy seeing that happen, (especially if it involves the hanging of Bush and his oil cronies), although the collapse will be painful. We're probably going to see lots of unnecessary deaths from cold this winter, lots of frost-bitten children in emergency wards, and that will be difficult to live through. It will take a while before new systems are found to replace the rotten old ones, but New is good when it comes to the cycle of life and decay.
Where I do find this positive is in the alternative power markets; electric vehicles actually have a shot at market viability. That could be a really cool thing to see. --If new schemes are implemented smartly, that is.
But seriously. Let's hang Bush.
-FL
... It doesn't matter what we do. If 6 billion people go to ANYTHING they will destroy it. And we are headed towards 9 to 11 billion last I heard. You are right. But don't worry, nature will find a way to fix that problem. I don't believe I will live to see it, but the Earth may very well be pristine again after the meek inherit it.I hate to make light of the situation, as there are definitely things we can do to better our current situation environmentally. But in the grand scheme, the Earth will be just fine... until the Sun envelops it.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Says the guy that's never paid a gas heating bill. Natural gas prices have gone up a lot, from almost nothing to a little bit. Natural gas is also locally supplied and has absolutely nothing to do with oil prices. Don't say they are the same because they aren't, it's still far far cheaper to heat a house with gas than it is with electricity.
Thank You Ayn Rand
I don't see any reason why Saudis would want to sell two barrels of oil for the price of one (that they ask - and get - today.) If the demand goes down they'd rather lower the production. This way they get the same cash flow and use less of their non-renewable resources. Given that there are very few sellers of oil on this planet, compared to buyers, the sellers are already free to dictate their terms, and that's what they already do. The only constraint upon them is in reeling the line in slowly, so that the economies of buying countries have time to adjust to new realities.
Sorry, but you fail economics. Changes in supply and demand are independent of each other. A change in supply says nothing about demand, and the opposite is also true.
Also, house prices *do* fluctuate just like stocks.
Maybe not
Myth said:
"Oil companies have leases all over America to drill for oil. They are currently only using 20 percent of these leases."
I agree. I remember back in the 80's after the Oil Boom, there was many a domestic sweet crude well capped due to low prices on the oil market. I'll bet some of those wells are due to be uncapped in the near future if they haven't been already.
There is a possible additional source in the Barnett Shale in Texas. The offshore sites could be increasingly utilized.
Also, Canada has that oil bearing sand they've been talking about. Extracting that oil is becoming economically feasible.
I'm not too keen on the ANWR drilling idea. We've already despoiled just about every pristine and beautiful place on earth... something needs to be preserved.
Bottom Line: There's oil to be had here without sending the wealth overseas.
It's time for a change though... I'm looking forward to additional advances in Fuel Cell and Solar Technology and other efficient ways to convert energy.
High oil prices, while tough on the buck, just might be the incentive we need to better explore alternatives. It's a bitter pill.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
You do realize that the area they want opened for drilling (an area the size of Dulles International Airport, about 2000 acres, in an area covering over 19.5 million acres) are quite literally empty, right? Nine months of the year they're ice and three months of the year they're mud. Nothing non-microbial makes its habitat there. It's nothing paradisaical and talking about it as if it were does not make it true.
The oil is going to magically transport itself from said area to the coast for shipment? How's it going to do that? Seems to me a giant freaking pipeline will be required. Even leaving aside the possibility of a pipeline spill, that requires massive human activity and movement of heavy equipment, construction of roads, etc. It has already been shown that the weight of heavy vehicles changes the soil in the long term.
It seems all the nuclear advocates I run across here are stuck in 1985 with this problem - will a nuclear advocate with a clue please stand up?
Build enough nuclear power plants and you'll be able to extract many times the energy required to simply put the waste into the sun. Not to mention that modern designs simply won't melt down, blow up, or do any of the other stuff people are afraid of.
A die-off? Are you fucking serious? Lack of food is caused by sociological problems. Environmental damage is being caused mostly by sociological problems, and partly because of moronic environmentalists saying OMFG its Nuclear! and stopping nuclear reactors from being built. Wars are caused by sociological problems.
Given enough energy, enough clean water can be made to make the deserts bloom. Given enough energy, carbon dioxide can be sequestered in many different ways.
What the world needs to do is kill a few war lords, put a large force in place to stop more from popping up, and build 500 nuclear power plants. Did you know that coal power kills many more people just from the uranium it puts into the air than nuclear power possibly could?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
When my Dad was my age, the loan on his (our) house was up - and he was a factory worker. Today, I make almost four times what he did, and can't even afford a three bedroom house. So much for the American Dream.
The society that your dad lived in, was built by the Greatest Generation... the one that endured the Great Depression and won WWII.
The society that you live in, was built by worst generation (IMO), children of the 60's (Clintons, GWBush etc.)
You're assuming that OPEC and other sellers won't decrease output to keep production (and therefore, prices) exactly where they are.
All drilling in Alaska is guaranteed to do is to screw up Alaska.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The average American will whine endlessly about the dangers of nuclear power and cower under the nearest rock at first mention of "radioactive". Never mind the far worse environmental contamination caused by coal and oil power plants; nuclear is the boogeyman and white-bread Americans won't go near it.
That is, unless it saves them money.
Coal and oil prices skyrocketed during the 1970s, which brought lots of attention to nuclear energy and caused the average American to decide that maybe he/she had simply got off on the wrong foot with that whole nuclear scare, and that these reactor thingies that were popping up left and right just might be the miracle technology that would save us from the evil oil barons. The love affair didn't last long, however; fossil fuel prices dropped again in the early 1980s and nuclear development came to a crashing halt. There was no longer a big economic incentive, and anything 'nuclear' became the boogeyman again overnight.
The reason nothing has improved (in the US) since your books were written in 1985 is because no new plants have been built since then; even those plants under construction in the 1980s ended up being scrapped. The US is still using primitive 30 or 40 year old reactors while countries not in a cheap-fossil-fuel-induced stupor have been developing newer, safer, lower waste designs.
But once again, fossil fuels are expensive. And once again, Americans are seeing nuclear as the miracle solution. Until it stops saving them money.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The problem with bringing guns into a fistfight is the other part is going to step it up.
That means instead of somewhat bloodless captures the pirates will be shooting first and looting later.
Actually, it appears to me that we're using less fuel. More of the coal and limestone is being used in the US, near the demand. But overall the key difference is things are getting moved around a bit less.
My previous comment was meant as a joke, but a nuclear reactor is indeed an enormous dirty bomb waiting to go off. Thankfully we've only once had a large-scale release, but there have been several other smaller incidents and some averted catastrophes that can only be described as miraculous.
While there have been and will continue to be great improvements in reactor safety, there will always be mistakes and failures.
It is impossible to call nuclear energy "safe...PERIOD!" It just happens to be "safer" than burning billions of tons of fossil fuels every year.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
IMHO nuclear should be the LAST resort,and with new methods like molten salt and super black materials for solar,ever more efficient designs for wind,geothermal,tidal,etc it is simply not the right course at this point and time. There are simply too many problems we haven't fixed as far as treatment and disposal of waste to make nuclear a good idea at this time. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Nothing to do with schools being out for the summer? I always see a huge difference in commute time during school vacations.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
Actually, ships can be a bit more efficient . Depends on ship size, of course, and the availability of waterways vs. rails.
I believe the point is that it can be made safer, but never totally safe. Your own point about AC vs DC supports this idea. Yes, electricity is used every day by about a bajillion people (it's a technical term)). The VAST majority of them use it safely, but every day somebody, somewhere does something stupid and gets themselves fried. Electricity is far, far safer than it was, but it is still dangerous in the hands of imperfect humans. Humans make mistakes. Some people think this doesn't apply to them, but they are mistaken.
The difference between a dude who stands in his hot tub to work on the filter pump and the guy who spills soda on the reactor control panel, is that hot tub boy only kills himself and at most a few of his friends.
For the record, I am in favor of nuclear energy (Go Isotopes!), but let's not kid ourselves about it being TOTALLY safe.
Oddly enough, it's when we think something is totally safe that we are most likely to screw up.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4891
(My point is not that it can not work, it is that it is not ready yet...)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
That's BS. My girlfriend's diesel VW runs on renewable biodiesel (from used restaurant grease) right now, and it's a ten-year-old car! Half of Brazil's cars run on renewable ethanol from sugar cane. Renewable hydro, nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal are all viable today, when used appropriately (e.g. see Iceland for geothermal). Sure, neither wind nor solar is reliable enough to replace base load by itself, but if you use them together, in a distributed fashion, then they can even each other out and work just fine.
It's really not that hard.
That's awesome that your GF has a car that runs on vegetable oil. Is there enough restaurant vegetable oil to run all of America's cars? No. Is there enough to run a decent size percentage of America's cars? No. So this is not a viable option.It's great that Brazil can run half of their cars on ethanol. If we were to turn all of the US into sugar cane fields, would it be enough ethanol to power America's cars? Unfortunately, NO. So this is not a viable option either.
Hydro, nuclear, solar, wind tidal and geothermal are all available today, but can THEY power our cars? No. Sure, some cars are electric, but we are decades away from the technology that will allow us rely on them for our transportation needs. So while these are great for powering our homes and businesses, but we don't use oil for that anyway. Electricity will not be a viable option for powering our cars until the technology and infrastructure allows for vehicles to be completely charged in less than 5 minutes. Again, decades away.
Now all these are great options and will, someday, be viable to power our cars and get us to work, and our planes to travel, our trucks to move products to the market and our ships to get products imported and exported. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, our cars run on refined crude oil. We need crude oil NOW to power our economies that will pay for the research to get these ideas to the drawing board and then to our garages.
So, yeah, it is that hard.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Who cares about the environment, it can recover in 20-40 years.
Where do you get this crap? Take a look at the island of Crete. This island used to be almost completely covered in forest. Then the Minoans began clear-cutting it for lumber to build ships. This continued for several generations. When the forest was clear cut, there was no longer any mechanism for the top soil to be held in place. It washed into the sea. The isle of Crete is now a wasteland in terms of the ability to grow forest -- solid forest has not grown there in thousands years.
You are naive, ignorant, short sighted, and have an offensive disregard for the natural world.
O.k. maybe he needed 20K-40K years, but he is still generally right. It's funny when you take a single island that has been terraformed into what those natives thought that they wanted and well then complain that the only environment that they have is grass. In that single case, sure, I'd expect there to be grass and such much longer. To me nature has recovered. What are you complaining about is you don't like the nature that has recovered there.
I don't like that oceans don't have trees growing out of them so let's bio engineer trees that float/grow on oceans. There are you happy we could have trees and things with trees. What is this focus on trees? Nature is everything. We aren't separate, but a part of it. And nature did survive everything that man has done to it.
Oh, you don't like it because it didn't come back in the same exact form. Well, on shit. Nature ain't stupid, if it put a forest back there the humans would just cut it down again; it's much better to have what well survive humanity living there and that humanity can't make too much use of harvesting it. Natural selection is all about surviving on this planet with humanity. Forests weren't fit for that environment any longer, but grass, dirt, and mud were.
Don't forget to mention that even with scrubbers, coal plants emit more radioactive materials directly into the air and otherwise than nuclear plants.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
You suggest the "natural world" should forever be a snapshot of when you first noticed it. An environment is not an entity of its own accord. It is a result of all its inputs, and we are a very large input on the environment. The only difference between us and other inputs is our self-awareness.
The impact we have on the "natural world" becomes part of that world. Are there not birds, rats, cockroaches, etc. that thrive on the fruits of human progress? What makes them less important than the flora and fauna in a tropical rainforest?
Erm, hello ? It might take 1 barrel of crude to make 19 gallons of gasoline, but at the same time you're also getting other products (natural gas, kerosene, diesel, fuel oil, paraffins) out of that barrel of crude that can also be sold.
Absolutely no fudging necessary, just a bit of understanding of how a refinery works.
As for vegan oil, how many cars do you think our current crop of vegetable oil will power? I would be shocked if it were more than 1%. Actually, I looked it up:
Briante said there are about 100 million gallons of waste restaurant oil generated annually. That would only replace about 0.07 percent of the 140 billion gallons of gas Americans use each year, and that's assuming everyone switched from gasoline to diesel engines. Using new vegetable oil - not the used stuff from restaurants -raises similar scarcity questions. You said: What we really need is a technology for synthesizing hydrocarbons like gasoline from CO2 + H20 + electricity. Then we could use the existing (except for the particular thing I'm talking about, of course) technology and infrastructure just fine. I agree completely! Unfortunately, these types of technologies as well as the ethanol mentioned above are at least decades away. What do we do in the meantime? I say we increase domestic energy production (drill for oil!) and use the revenues from that to fund the research required to speed these technologies along. Provided the trillions (yes, TRILLIONS) of dollars that could be invested here, we will find an energy solution long before the oil runs out and not ruin our economies in the process.There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.