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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."
Now if companies would pull their heads out and either/or/both go to a 4 day work week and re-implement telecommuting...
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If high fuel cost continues, it will only bring back the sail-boats, not the off-shore jobs.
... by The Invisible Hand.
Adam Smith strikes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's almost like there was some kind of invisible hand at work.
It should be bringing nuclear wessels. With the cost of oil to fire a ship being what it is, the Savannah would have been competitive back in the 70's. The only problem to solve is that high seas piracy still exists and the US government doesn't want the nebulous "bad guys" to steal a nuclear wessel and reuse its atomic fuel for something nasty.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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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.........
Recently I saw a show that visited Asbury Park in NJ, and it was stated that the slow decline of the park started with cheap airfares. It immediately struck me that this trend should now start to reverse itself, as travel costs are rising while consumer confidence is dropping.
High gas prices are going to have some bad side effects, but also quite a few good ones. Hopefully, reduced travel will be effected on almost every scale: suburbs will wilt and cities will grow stronger, local foods will become more popular, inefficient business travel will be replaced by online meetings, etcetera. I think most people who have wanderlust aren't going to let higher airline prices stop them, but perhaps they'll take fewer and longer trips in order to reduce expenses - e.g., instead of going to France and Spain on one trip, and the U.K. on another, they'll wait and take a longer trip to visit all three.
"The 163 pounds of uranium she consumed is estimated to have provided the equivalent power of nearly 29 million gallons of fuel oil."
That just put everything in perspective. Holy hell. For the amount of money you saved you could hire a small army to arm your vehicle. US Government could nationalize some ships.
29 million gallons of fuel.
Damn. Just Damn.
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
my dad owns a drycleaning plant. steel hangers are one of his biggest supply expenses now. a few years ago a hanger might have been $0.10 or so, then 2 or 3 years ago it doubled overnight to $0.20, and a few weeks ago *that* doubled.
some of the larger hangers are 50 cents each. 50 cents for a metal coat hanger. he needs several hundred of these in a given week, nevermind the price of all the other supplies going up. it hurts, bad, and he has had to raise prices because of it (though not enough to actually cover the added cost)
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
my dad owns a drycleaning plant. steel hangers are one of his biggest supply expenses now. a few years ago a hanger might have been $0.10 or so, then 2 or 3 years ago it doubled overnight to $0.20, and a few weeks ago *that* doubled.
some of the larger hangers are 50 cents each. 50 cents for a metal coat hanger. he needs several hundred of these in a given week, nevermind the price of all the other supplies going up. it hurts, bad, and he has had to raise prices because of it (though not enough to actually cover the added cost)
Perhaps your dad could provide a discount for customers who provide their own hangers.
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.
Thank you, Mr Checkov. Mr Sulu, lay in a course for the 1970's.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Are you kidding? You think that the product size actually matters? There is very little difference in shipping a container of refrigerators vs. a container of pens. It's a tiny fraction of fuel economy (a few percent) due to weight differences. The cost & distribution challenges come in breaking up the product at distribution centers, but that happens regardless of where the product is manufactured.
What will matter is raw ores (iron ore) and other relatively dense materials (steel, lumber), which greatly increase transportation costs and are easily replaceable commodities. This will be the first place the effects are seen, but it will spread to other products.
"The cost of shipping a refrigerator across the sea is way smaller than the cost of trucking it across a state."
Perhaps if you ship them one at a time. But that's not how trucks or ships work.
The statement in the article notes an increased container shipping cost of $3,000 to $8,000 shipping from China to NY. That $5,000 difference is about 1,000 gallons of diesel, which is enough to drive more than 4,000 miles carrying the 29+- tons of a fully loaded standard shipping container.
No, it's a lose-lose broken window fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Paying for breathing air might increase the GDP, but it would only be making the world net poorer. By definition of the consumer price index (CPI) being fraudulent data, so too is the GDP fraudulent data. Double the supply of money, ceteris paribus, the GDP doubles. Twice as much money trades for the exact same things. But in the real world inflation works it way through the economy discretely and unevenly, not universally evenly. People who get the new money and new credit first, spend more on specific things first. In the late 90s it was internet stocks, from 2000-2007 it was houses, and now it's commodities like oil. The poorest (last to receive the new credit and dollars) will suffer the worst for the longest time.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
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
they don't make steel in Pittsburgh any more. US Steel may be based here but most of the steel plants are no longer in the region. They make steel in Pittsburgh the same way they make cars in Detroit. Pittsburgh is mostly medical science and hospitals now. When industry comes back to the U.S. it will be in places that are less union friendly. (for the record, I do live in Pittsburgh)
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
In the 50's it was Japan,
In the 60's it was Hong Kong
In the 70's it was Taiwan
In the 80's and early 90's it was South East Asia
In the late 90's to now it has been China
To be worthwhile producing elsewhere you have to be able to produce for less than 30% of your home costs.
There is nowhere left to go
We have to manufacture our own again
So maybe we will get decent working conditions at last!
The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime - Floyd, Pink
My dad has worked in steel for the past 38 years and he says they are busy as hell because the fuel cost and weak dollar has been making US steel cheaper for a while now.
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?
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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.
The problem with telecommuting is that your job is basically dependent on the quality of the IT staff to a much higher degree. My employer tries to do telecommuting, but somewhere between cost cutting in IT, draconian security restrictions, and a dodgy network connection, it fails to be useful for getting real work done.
We've been looking to move out of our high cost of living area for quite some time, but the rising cost of gas has put that on hold. I would like to buy a house - and can afford one on the edge of the suburbs, but alas, any saving in mortgage payments would be consumed by the cost of fuel. Even though I'm just a fifteen minute commute from work, I spend nearly fifty dollars a week getting there and back.
So yeah, it might bring some manufacturing jobs back home. But those of us who have become used to working in the city and commuting out from the cheaper communities are finding themselves in quite a bind. I can't afford a house in my current area, and I can't afford the gas to drive from the places where I can afford a house.
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I'm going to have to wait another 5 to 10 years for the next housing market crash before I'll be able to move into a house. 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 for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The EU is doing just fine dealing with $5+ for a gallon of gas,
Are you kidding? So far Europe has had truck drivers go on strike against fuel tax, fuel delivery drivers go on strike for a 14% pay increase, annual electricity/gas bills rising at 40%/year threatening to push a quarter of all households (5 million families) into fuel poverty, councils raising the cost of school meals due to the expense of transportation. Even the police are having to cut back on front line staff due to the additional expense. Food bills have risen by 20% since the start of the year.
The advertisements on the sides of public transport buses read "Fed up of paying fuel duty to go nowhere, take the bus instead and stop your wallet from going empty". Otherwise many people are choosing to cycle in to work, especially university staff.
All of this is predicted to send house prices down by at least 10%, and then one minister tells people that should stop being so miserable about the rising cost of living.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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?
Less energy afforded and produced makes the world net poorer exactly the same way less food afforded and produced makes the world net poorer. Decreasing the supply of drinking water by half may make the price of that water double, but that means the world is twice as worse off by definition of having half as much water.
Increasing the costs of trade is just increasing the costs of the division of labor. Would you be better off if you to make everything you have completely by yourself? Grow and harvest your own food, make your own clothes, build your own house, manufacture and build your own computer? You wouldn't have enough time and skill to do it all by yourself and thus you would be much poorer operating as an isolated autocratic individual.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
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.
Real problem is still TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Hmmm, so maybe going nuclear IS the solution...
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).
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.
Well, I think that as soon as they announce that we will start new drilling out there in previously 'banned' areas...that speculators in oil will begin selling off...and that should drop the prices almost overnight back to more normal levels.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Environmentalists have been hoping for high fuel prices, to encourage use of less fuel.
They weren't expecting the return of blast furnaces to Pittsburgh, however. So we burn a little less gasoline, and dump tons of coal and limestone in the steel furnaces.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Oil companies have leases all over America to drill for oil. They are currently only using 20 percent of these leases.
They want to get the Alaskan drilling rights because they are GREEDY and want them for down the road when they've drilled all their current leases.
When you see the president that drilling in ANWAR will help the US, he is LYING. (That, and his lips are moving--so you can tell he's lying.)
"Real problem is still TOO MANY PEOPLE."
well then stop being part of the problem and be part of the solution
commit suicide today!
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Also, the 1002 area (the area where we want to explore) is about 2000 acres, or the size of Dulles Airport, out of a total ANWR size of 20 MILLION acres, or about the size of N. Carolina. Less than .01% of ANWR would be touched. Would your governor forbid your from building an airport in your state because of a NON-endangered species that lives on the other side of the state?
Besides, oil and gas development and wildlife are successfully coexisting in Alaska 's arctic today. For example, the Central Arctic Caribou Herd which migrates through Prudhoe Bay has grown from 3000 animals to its current level of 32,000 animals. The arctic oil fields have very healthy brown bear, fox and bird populations equal to their surrounding areas. So any supposed environmental catastrophe is a myth anyway.
And, don't get me wrong, I'm all about conservation and renewable research. Unfortunately, renewables won't be viable for another 20 years at best, so WTF are we supposed to do until then? This forced conservation that we are in now is going to ruin the economy and punish everyone for no apparent reason other than unfounded, outdated environmental concerns. Local drilling serves the purpose of making the US energy independent until we can develop alternatives and get the infrastructure set up to replace petroleum.
I understand that drilling in ANWR is not THE solution. But then again, neither is wind and/or solar. Should we give up on those ideas also because they are not THE solution to all of our energy problems? Of course not. Wind and solar are only part of a total energy solution. Just as conservation and alternatives are part of the solution as well.
Oh, and as for the topic at hand, rather than blame oil as the sole reasons jobs are returning home, it may be wise to also consider that the falling dollar has made outsourcing that much more expensive.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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
Oil was $10 a barrel in 1999.
That's down from $34 in 1982 (about $80 in 1999 inflation-adjusted dollars).
http://www.ioga.com/Special/crudeoil_Hist.htm
Why would the saudi's sell oil for $10 when they could sell it for $34?
Because they can't.
Every day this goes on, the longer oil prices will be low.
Every day, more people start carpooling, move closer to work, replace a 13mpg truck with a 31mpg (or higher) car, start riding public transportation, start working from home 2 days a week, start working 9/80 schedules.
My morning commute is now consistently 5 minutes faster in the morning and 15 minutes faster in the evening because the number of cars on the road has dropped that much.
Already, Iran is stacking up tankers because their online storage tanks are full.
Already our national gas usage is down about 4% in one month.
The current prices are caused by speculation. The same bubble of excess wealth passing through it that passed through the stock market in 1996-2000, housing in 2002-2005, and commodities now. The true "last barrel" cost of producing oil right now is about $50 a barrel. Everything over that is excess.
Once demand drops like a stone, then the oil companies STILL have to pay the bills. A lot of them are spending money like water. A very few of them are investing the current profits wisely.
They will sell oil to whoever will buy it- because just like the average salaryman in the U.S., they are just a couple paychecks from being homeless.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
Actually Canada isn't just talking about it, they're furiously producing it. We've quietly become your primary supplier of crude.
Yet with all this new supply pouring in from the north the price of oil hasn't dropped a bit.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Perhaps you missed the part where the libs, enviro-whackos, and "intellectuals" lobbied successfully against building any new reactors.
Why the hell should anyone research nuclear power generation technology when there was no way to build them and recoup the research costs?
You guys fucked it up big time in the 80s by shutting down nukes. Now you are all shitting bricks over "climate change" (not Global Warming anymore, is it?...at least not for another 10 years)
So the one thing that could have averted the latest end-of-the-world scenario is dead in the water because of a previous end-of-the-world scenario.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Just don't have any children.
Slashdot: Part of the solution!
Then maybe if steel gets high enough, your dad might stop pointlessly giving away an endless supply of free hangers that end up in the trash. A principle of consuming only what you need, rather than all you possibly can. But then this sort of thing is well overdue.
Ok I'll bite.
Nuclear power, even when considering the one nuclear meltdown that we have had and all the deaths caused by it, has resulted in less deaths than any other form of power generation per MWh generated. Including wind and solar.
Secondly, Nuclear power in the only baseload power source which does not release significant amounts of CO2. If you believe that we need to reduce CO2 emissions significantly in the next few years to avoid catastrophic anothropogenic global warming, then Nuclear Power is your best currently available option.
Thirdly, Uranium is one of the most abundant materials in the earths crust - though it does cost quite a bit to extract. We have known reserves that will last us quite some time (though the same is true for coal).
Lastly, we are currently in the third generation of nuclear power plants, which now in the event of an emergency automatically shut down. i.e. it requires individuals to be pushing buttons to keep the reactor running and in a "dangerous" mode. If human intervention stops, the reactor ceases being dangerous (well excluding the radioactivity danger present in the fuel itself).
The problem with nuclear power is threefold - public perceptions (generally from irrational fear), high water usage and high long run marginal costs. Canada and France have shown us that nuclear power can provide a significant amount of baseload power relatively safely.
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?
The American Dream is overrated because the "advertised" American dream is not necessary. If the standard to "achieving" the American dream is to own a house with an ample lot size, a nice car or three, and enough cash to throw parties every weekend or whatever other activity you find fun, well I say that's just the TV and popular culture brainwashing you.
You can be perfectly happy and successful living in a town house without a yard and an econobox car. Almost every form of entertainment or activity is still accessible without the McMansion or the SUV. The only lacking thing is the increased expenses and the ability to flex your debt-inflated-penis with your shiny SUV and spinners.
I'm probably in the same boat as you. I make more than my parents yet I can't afford a house near work. I can afford a 2 bedroom condo though. And after thinking, I would be plenty happy with condo as long as I was single. I'd still be happy with it if I was married. The only time it would start to feel cramped is if I wanted to have a family. But by then, I would probably be married and I figure a 3 bedroom town house would suffice. The only thing I really get with a bigger house is bragging rights and a whole lot more maintenance. For example if there was a yard I'd have to pay for a gardener or do it myself. If there were extra rooms I'd have to clean yet another room. I don't need that. A 2 bedroom condo with a decent kitchen, living room, and a few complex facilities (pool/patio) is plenty to keep me happy.
Houses (with full yards, extra rooms, and large garages) only make sense in rural areas. In places like suburbs they're just a luxury and bragging rights.
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.
> we haven't figured out what to do with the tons of nuclear
> waster we have NOW,much less if we did like McCain wants and
> added 45 new plants.
Of course ``we'' have:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Fast_neutron_reactors_(FBR)
Prohibited by the Carter Administration in the USA, but used
throughout the World. Breeder reactors use the output of
conventional fission plants as fuel and the resultant waste,
once reprocessed, has a half-life of a few centuries instead
of hundreds of millenia.
I have to point out the flaws in that one. Part of the reason we don't make nearly as much stuff anymore is because of the lack of tariffs, which have been taken away in the last few decades. A return to higher tariffs would be just fine in my book, because it would mean that more of our stuff would be produced *here*, in the US. Which would mean more jobs.
I completely agree. In fact, I want individual states to have tariffs. Can you imagine all the 50 states having their own chip fabs? Imagine the number of jobs created!
Why stop there? Let each city slap tariffs on products from other cities. This will mean more jobs. It could be just like the 1600s with each village making *everything* that they need locally. This way, money will not leave the village and, since money means wealth according to your theory, this will mean everyone will be much richer.
Actually, here is a great way to increase the number of jobs.
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.
Check out this article which details exactly what this lease and usage entails.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121391719487790187.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
In other words, the politicians are using word play to infer that the oil companies are drilling on the lands relying on public ignorance that a lease of oil producing lands does not equate to a guarantee of oil.
So basically, the process is.
1. Secure the lease
2. Get the permits to do test drilling
3. Do test drilling
4. Determine if its economically feasible to recover the oil
5. Get permits to actually to set up a site to manage it
6. Get permits to drill on the site
7. Go to court to keep your permits after being sued by every other environmentalist group
8. Drill for oil
9. Profit?
Remember the first rule : If a Congressman's lips are moving he is 99% of the time telling you a lie or a falsehood by omission.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Guess what's different from 1999...
- the US dollar is worth ~40% less than it was in 1999
- there are over 2 billion people whose economy, and therefore demand for energy, is surging.
- there is an oil supply graph that, rather than increasing every year, has been roughly flat for the past three years (not coincidentally, the time when the price has skyrocketed)
Oil, in our lifetimes, is a finite commodity. It has an energy return on investment higher than anything else out there right now. There is still a lot in the ground, which is to say, we're not going to run out any time soon. But we have skyrocketing demand and a constrained supply. In the past, high prices have led to exploration and increased production. Well guess what. The large deposits of easy to retrieve oil have been found. We've reached a point of diminishing returns. Oh, there's still a lot of oil. The Saudis continue to pump almost 10 million barrels of it a day, more or less the same amount they've been pumping for the past 5 years. But in that time, they've been bringing new drilling projects online, in order to make up for declining production out of their old fields. And their oil exports have dropped by over 10% in just the past 2 years, due to increased domestic demand from a booming economy.
You can tell yourself it's all speculation, if it makes you happy. But the supply of oil to global markets is no longer increasing, while demand remains high, globally. And there are a whole lot of people in Asia who will gladly buy any oil that we don't.
I think people forget that this is not the first time people have been looking for a new fuel for industrial purposes.
Up until the 1850's, lighting lamps were fueled by whale oil, and with the rapid decline in the whale population even by then there was considerable concern about what to substitute for whale oil. The discovery of using kerosene derived from crude oil about this period changed all that, and that was the foundation of the oil industry as we know it today.
Today, rapid changes in technology could make gasoilne obselete as a motor fuel within the next 20 years. The most important announcement was MIT's announcement of research into high-energy supercapacitors using carbon nanotubes back in 2006; that may just open the way for a drastic reduction in the size of the battery pack needed for a battery-electric vehicle (BEV), making it possible for a practical electric car that could carry four passengers in comfort yet go up to 400 km (248 miles) or more on a single charge, and the charge time for the battery pack would be a tiny fraction of even Li-On battery packs.
That same technology could make it possible to have electrical storage units from home size to city size that could provide power after being charged up by a solar cell array or wind turbine array. I can imagine a single house with a sun-facing solar cell array (now much cheaper thanks to nanotechnology) that provides power during daytime and charges a supercapacitor electrical storage unit for use at night.
In short, I see within 20-25 years most homes and apartment complexes with cheap solar arrays on their roofs and supercapacitor electrical storage units somewhere in the building.
We lost an bike-riding employee to a rhino attack just this week. I can still picture him, desperately peddling away in those Birkenstocks, trying to outrun that rhino while we sat back watching helplessly from the office window. We found out later that the rhino was attracted to the color in his tye-dyed t-shirt. All that was left of him after the rhino got done was part of his torso and his laminated PETA membership card.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake 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.
I don't have the energy to go through this all over again, so I'll punt to the experts:
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6700447/Scrubbing-dirty-bombs-explosive-hype.html
http://www.news.uiuc.edu/gentips/02/07dirtybomb.html
http://www.notposta.com/?p=19
http://www.onthemedia.org/yore/transcripts/transcripts_072503_fear.html
Long story short: Dirty bombs don't work. It's not nearly as easy to distribute radioactive materials as the media would have you believe.
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