Just to add to that, there are a couple of characteristics of measles that makes it much more appropriate to require vaccination than say a flu shot. Measles virus is transmitted through the air, and can have a very long latency time in the air. The original carrier can contaminate a room and then be gone for two hours or more while the infectious virus remains in the room. Plus, the measles carrier does not have to exhibit symptoms yet for the virus to be communicable. Washing your hands is not going to protect you from measles.
I work in an industry where I travel outside the US fairly often for work. Since many countries REQUIRE vaccinations for quite a few things just to get a visa, and quite a few more are recommended, I do not find it especially onerous that Disney might require vaccinations for appropriate diseases, which of course will make Disney responsible for the cost. I would assume at this point that Disney's insurance carriers will require this as the liability will likely be high and they may be considered negligent. Measles can cause pregnancy loss, bronchitis, laryngitis, pneumonia, and ear infections (which could cause long-term hearing loss).
I don't get a choice about drug tests and even if the drugs I am found taking are legal in the state I am located in, I am still just as fired if I fail the test. How is requiring vaccinations from diseases that you are almost certain to catch if exposed to and not vaccinated against any different in principle (i.e. public/worker safety) than requirements for drug testing?
"We're spending 3.5 percent of US GDP to subsidize fossil fuel exploration, drilling, processing, shipping, and use. With our tax dollars, our public lands, our infrastructure priorities. Just getting rid of all the tax subsidies, the artificial low land and sea lease rates for drilling, the tax incentives for business, would mostly fix it."
Citation required. Revenue from oil and gas alone is the second largest source of revenue to the Federal government behind the IRS. Most states also earn huge portions of their revenue from taxing oil and gas directly as it is produced in the form of severance taxes. I am unaware of any tax policy that grants favor to oil and gas operators that is not also available to other businesses that are not producing oil and gas. Some studies show that the oil and gas industry employs over 5% of the US workforce and creates about 7.5% of US GDP. Yet, you somehow think that half of that is being thrown into tax subsidies that you probably cannot reference.
This idea would help, but relies on oversimplification of the carbon cycle. Fossil fuel only adds about 4-5 gigatons of carbon per year to the atmosphere. Soil is actually the source of about 61-62 gigatons of carbon per year. That is a far larger source, and if you add another 2 gigatons that are directly from burning trees for deforestation, the major source of carbon in the atmosphere is actually from natural decomposition and oxidation of the biosphere. Then you add another 50 gigatons from respiration of biologic organisms (which includes plants) and the reduction of carbon by trees and other plants balances out to a negative number, with the resulting input of carbon to the atmosphere almost equal to the 4-5 gigatons from fossil fuels. If agriculture were practiced differently, it might be possible that the 5 gigatons of carbon sourced from fossil fuels, along with the 4-5 gigatons sourced from soils and the biosphere could probably be offset simply by better soil practices. Agriculture and poor soil conservation practices are possibly the largest impact on global climate, since they also impact other heat balances like albedo.
If you really want to reduce carbon from the carbon cycle, find a way to increase the numbers of ocean plankton, along with other marine organisms that have been responsible for sequestering 99.9% of the carbon on the entire planet into the form of sedimentary rock.
I have bad news for you. ALL carbon is part of the carbon cycle. Even the carbon in limestone, which accounts for 99.9% of the carbon on the planet, is part of the carbon cycle, and it almost all got there through biogenic pathways. Even the carbon in "fossil fuel" came from living organisms. You really don't have a clear understanding of the carbon cycle.
This article is well written, but is mostly FUD and not fact. I make a living evaluating gas and oil reserves, so I know what I am talking about.
"Although the extent of the US experience is unlikely to be replicated elsewhere, and US estimates of economically recoverable quantities remain a matter of debate, shale gas has the potential to become a widely accessible global fuel."
Only the last part of that sentence is true. US estimates of economically recoverable quantities are conservative if anything. In reality, with the proper gas and oil prices, the US has far more than official estimates from EIA, IEA, or USGS, all of whom are dependent on access to data, most of which is proprietary that they will never see. Economics changes reserves estimates each quarter, so whenever someone says economically recoverable, they are confusing the issue and not really telling you a number that is related to total resource. Over time most resource that is uneconomic is likely to become economic, so those number are always "debatable" by definition. He is being disingenuous with this statement.
US shale gas can be replicated elsewhere and will be. Russia currently has little openly expressed interest in shale gas, but probably has more reserves than North America. Saudi Arabia is pursuing shale gas. Argentina's shale gas and oil has been very successful, but the government has made outside investors nervous and slowed the process. China has the resource, but because of lack of infrastructure, will be slow to move forward. India likewise has shale gas but currently has a regulatory regime that makes it uneconomic. Regulations and politics are the primary obstacle of shale gas in many countries. Those may be hard to change but do not represent impossible obstacles. Shale gas will become a worldwide phenomenon, it is just a matter of time, probably decades. Shale gas has the potential to free much of the developing world from dependence on imported oil and gas and allow them to develop industrial bases of their own. All that is needed is the political will to allow it to happen.
"Some of the other categories of unconventional gas—tight gas, coal bed methane, aquifer gas, and gas hydrates—dwarf shale gas in magnitude."
Not true except for gas hydrates, which so far have not proven to be recoverable in commercial quantities. The difficulty is their lack of concentration, as well as their location primarily below permafrost and the continental shelf. He forgets to mention, while pointing out the methane emissions of the oil and gas industry, that coal mines are actually some of the largest emitters of methane. The recently published methane hot spot map of the US showed the largest methane emissions in the US are from the largest strip mine in North America, in the Four Corners Region. Coal emits methane as soon as it is uncovered, and continues to emit methane during transport in open rail cars, and in the large storage piles where it is kept near power plants.
"Moreover, methane, the chief component of natural gas, is itself a heat-trapping greenhouse gas with 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. If total methane leakage—from drilling through end use—is greater than about 4 percent, that could negate any climate benefits of switching from coal and oil to gas."
This is a very misleading statement. Methane has a half life of less than 12 years, and only has the multiple he refers to if considered over a 100 year period. Basically this is statistical manipulation. In any case, coal emits more methane than natural gas drilling (yet he mentions the "huge" potential of coal bed methane) so switching from coal to natural gas will always result in a climate change benefit.
"Accounting for the climate impacts of methane leakages eliminated all climate mitigation benefits."
The only studies that have concluded this have all been discredited by later studies, often based simply on the methodology of obtaining the methane leakage numbers. One study actually included emis
Bullshit.
Beach erosion happens with or without rising sea levels. In California the beaches are famous for having different sand levels between summer and winter simply because of the change in the size and frequency of waves on the Pacific Ocean. Long-shore drift is a well known process that assures that beaches will erode without changing sea level. It has always functioned and always will as long as the Earth keeps rotating and wind patterns create waves.
What few people who live near or on beaches ever understand is that they live in a temporary and transient environment. Sand on all beaches moves constantly, and long-shore currents move sand along the shore until the sand reaches a channel. After the sand moves into a channel, it moves into deeper ocean waters where it is lost for economic purposes, but will serve just fine to create future sandstone deposits. The reason the sand on beaches is being deplenished was not mentioned in the article at all. The beach sand has had its supply blocked by anthropogenic engineering, such as dams on rivers, channelized rivers, levees, and many other structures. If you dam a river, the dam catches all the sand that that river would have delivered to beaches through its delta. It you channelize a river, like the Mississippi River for example, the sand supply is delivered to deep ocean water, and no longer deposited on the river delta.
Much of the cause of "rising sea levels" is actually from this problem. River deltas like southern Louisiana have built up miles thick deposits of loosely consolidated sands and clays and gradually subside as they compact naturally. Unless the river is allowed to flood these areas like it always did, there is not enough sediment supply to keep these places above sea level. Along the Texas Gulf Coast the problem has been that virtually every river that crosses the state has been dammed, and some of them have more than one dam. That means very little sand is making it to the beaches of Texas, and gives some alarmists an excuse to claim sea level is rising. West Coast beaches, and East Coast beaches have much the same problem. Rising sea level does not always mean the water level is rising- very often it means the land is sinking, or in the case of beaches, simply being naturally eroded and carried into the ocean depths.
It is not only possible to make sand from rock it is done in many places. Sandstone is rock made from sand, and the sand grains have already been rounded and weathered by ancient oceans, beaches, and rivers. Crushing it makes rock into sand that is just like the beach sand it once was.
I am a geologist with an advanced degree. I have spent my life studying the Earth. I have worked in Ethiopia, with very famous anthropologists, and did research on paleoclimate and paleoceanography in order to get my degree. I have published in the field of paleoclimate.
I have no problem believing that climate is changing. I have seen millions of years of evidence for that. I even have no problem believing that anthropological climate change is significant, although my own informed opinion is that it began when agriculture became a widespread practice, not when oil and gas became commonly used. I do have a problem with the concept that there is "scientific consensus" about climate change. First of all, that term often includes many scientists who did not study hard science, especially when it is from the IPCC. There is much more nuance in the scientific community than is ever acknowledged in the media. I for one, believe (and have millions of years of evidence at my disposal) that Milankovitch Cycles are much more significant of a factor in climate change than greenhouse effects. I also believe that albedo is much more significant. I have built computer climate models. I understand the data (and see many many problems with it) and I understand the numerous assumptions that go into building any model.
I realize some will dismiss me when I say this- but I tell oil companies where to drill wells. I apply millions of dollars of data to that effort, and have access to databases that number over one million wells in some cases. I have the best computer software at my disposal that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and I have had access to supercomputers in times past. I have millions of dollars worth of very detailed seismic data to work with. I look at the rock with scanning electron microscopes and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on laboratory tests. I use satellite data, and surface geochemisty, and I fly planes around detecting hydrocarbons with spectrometers. I model everything in time, tracing events over millions of years. I work with a team of geologists and engineers. Each time we drill an exploration well, we reach a consensus. And probably nine out of ten times, our consensus, based on engineering studies, geologic studies, and seismic studies is WRONG. Even the largest oil company in the world only has a 1 in 3 success case on all wells drilled (and that includes wells that are much less risky than exploration wells). With complicated Earth systems like geology or climate, consensus is not a guarantee of anything. It is a group opinion, often obtained after much interaction where each individual has compromised by trying to consider the data brought to the table by other workers. Consensus is not science- it might be political science- but it is not an indication of fact or reality.
Contacts, and sometime headhunters will get you interviews. My current job was introduced to me by a headhunter and then my existing contacts inside the organization did the rest. Not online forms.
I have had two recent contacts from company HR departments that already had my online application. They were calling me to say they had found me on LinkedIn and wanted to know if I would submit a resume. One of them had accepted my online application back in February and sent me a generic email response the same day saying I would not be considered for the job. They are still trying to fill the job and called me because they were "impressed" by me. I told them they had my resume, and had already rejected it. They spent another two weeks just trying to arrange a phone interview and I simply stopped answering the emails coming from several people in HR. How hard can it be to pick up the damn phone and call me? The other one which is based outside the US has had my resume in their system for ten years, which I have regularly updated, and has even interviewed me twice before. HR called me to see if I would send them a resume and interview for a job. I knew they would not hire me for because I am too old (this company has a mandatory retirement age of 60). The HR rep sheepishly confirmed they do in fact have a mandatory retirement age of 60, that is set by the Kingdom, and not their company (who cares?). They used to tell me they could not hire me because I did not have enough experience. Now I have all the experience they want, but I am too old. They had no idea I was already in their system and that they already had my DOB. How hard can it be to run a query on job applicants that have exceeded the mandatory age of retirement? Obviously LinkedIn is their go-to system, not their internal resume database. I agree that the online forms are maddening, but I always approach the task with the knowledge that it will never make a difference. It may be used to cover due diligence and get some disclosures out of the way, but chances are they will make you sign all that stuff again because they know their online system is a digital version of the round file. It will never get you an interview in my experience.
I have both an iPhone for work and a Droid 2 Global. Both have capacitive screens. Only the Droid 2 Global with a slide out keyboard is functional for me.
I can only use the slideout. I can read email on the iPhone, but can't reply. Why you say? Some days my skin is simply not recognized by capacitive screens, I can touch the screen for several seconds before it reacts. At times I have to move my fingers around to get the screen to recognize my touch. The Apple is almost worthless to me and might as well be a brick that I am forced to carry around. I often have trouble unlocking it with the screen. The Droid is only better because it has a slide out keyboard. It too has problems with the touch screen not working. I may be a small percentage, but there are people who cannot use touch screens. I even have trouble using some ATM's.
Really, who made that name up? These are airguns that are simply blowing compressed air into the water.
These are the same airguns that have been used for many decades in ocean waters everywhere in the world. I have watched sea lions playing in the towed array of air guns behind a survey ship as they are operating. Sound levels of these guns are comparable to the noise made by a tanker and are actually lower than the low frequency sonar used by Navies all over the world. Whales and other marine mammals are quite capable of avoiding the noise, and normally do just that. The Navies of the world have been making much more noise without any environmental hysteria for decades.
The subsidies the IEA refers to do not even exist in the United States. The reality is, if you look at the IEA map, the economies that subsidize fossil fuel are promoting consumption by not charging free market prices for oil and gas products. These economies are based on the assumption that oil and gas production are a national resource and that because of that they are to be distributed as benefits to all citizens. These are constructs of those governments, which include Mexico, Venezuela, the Middle East, China, and Russia. If any of these countries actually tried to eliminate the subsidy not only would their economy verge on collapse, they would likely have revolutions.
The idea that renewable energy will replace these subsidies in those economies is ludricous. Small farms that depend on fossil fuel for subsistence farming, small fishermen who depend on subsidized fuel to power their boats, and many other small businesses simply cannot substitute "renewable energy" for diesel power. Thousands of cars that burn cheap gasoline (Venezuela) or cheap natural gas (Iraq) are not going to be suddenly fueled by batteries charged from solar and wind power. Economies that derive most of the national revenue (the Middle East) from oil and gas production owned by the State, are not going to find a new source of revenue to feed and cloth their population with by generating solar and wind power. Their conclusion could not be more naive or more unrealistic.
The study makes a fallacious conclusion. It ignores the fact that people with scientific training are trained to be skeptics. Once you can find the holes in "proven research" and realize that expressions like "97% of all climate scientists" are bullshit because they do not define who climate scientists actually are- it is easy to dismiss many scientific conclusions and continue to hold beliefs that one knows are simply beliefs and not facts. As an example, a large number of scientists until very recently believed that oil and gas production in the United States had passed its peak production and the science supported that conclusion. At the same time a smaller number of skeptical scientists who were willing to accept a new geologic paradigm regarding oil and gas expulsion were working hard to find the oil that has now put the US in the top ranking spot for world oil production. Science is often wrong and those who change scientific belief are generally in the minority at the beginning of the change. Good scientists know that. Politicians, and those who are more inclined to spread their own agenda, either don't understand that, or ignore it. Science thrives on falsification of the proven.
If there is a generally accepted norm that I do not agree with....it does not mean my political or religious bias is the reason.....it simply means that I do not consider the evidence conclusive based on my scientific knowledge and experience. If that happens to mean I agree with Republicans or Democrats, that is only a coincidence. Correlation is not causation.
First of all, injection wells are not "fracking" (which is properly spelled fracing) and injection wells used for disposal of wastewater are not injecting only water from hydraulic fracturing. There are thousands of wells drilled with traditional vertical drilling methods in Oklahoma that produce water. There are wells that produce 90% water and 10% oil for most of the life of the well and this is common in some formations in Oklahoma (e.g. Mississippi Lime). That water has to be disposed of because it has high salinity- it was once ocean water- and the salinity is hard to deal with economically in traditional municipal wastewater treatment methods. In fact the aerospace industry and many other high-tech industries use disposal wells for disposing of various waste material. All of these disposal wells are regulated by the EPA as Class 2 wells. These injection well operators are contractors, providing a service to hundreds of different clients, mostly oil and gas, but not exclusively. They have operated these businesses since the 1940's (although at that time there were even fewer regulations and some of those disposal wells turned into Superfund sites (Southern California is one of those). Large amounts of the waste recovered by skimming and cleanup crews from the Macondo spill was injected into disposal wells.
The oil and gas industry is recycling wastewater from hydraulic fracturing in many cases, but sadly not every operator can or will do it. Here are some examples in a WSJ article: http://online.wsj.com/news/art... There are companies that can recycle frac water to the point it is potable and a few are doing that. There are also companies that deliver their waste water to municipal sewage plant operators that can bring the water to standards that allow it to be discharged into surface rivers.
1. I would acknowledge and even argue that the oil and gas industry needs to find more methods of recycling frac water. However, the conventional vertically drilled wells that have been around for many decades produce more wastewater than fracing in some areas. Examples are Mississippi Lime wells in Oklahoma and Kansas, Austin Chalk wells in Texas and Louisiana, and Phosphoria wells in the Rocky Mountains. Even the historically drilled well targets in Pennsylvania and Ohio have large quantities of water production associated with the oil. I think one reason the oil and gas industry is not reacting quickly to this is that they have ALWAYS had this much water to dispose of and the practice of hydraulic fracturing looks like more of the same to them.
2. The EPA is doing a lousy job of monitoring these Class 2 wells. As soon as slight tremors are measured pumping needs to stop. Seismic surveys need to be done around the wells that have proven to be an issue and new wells need this added to the permitting requirement. Yes that will add $10 million or more to the cost of these wells, but the alternative is public hew and cry about the bogeyman (which is how the public views earthquakes, and most other natural phenomenon), and some legitimate concern about damages caused by these tremors to nearby structures.
3. My own opinion is that fracturing with water is going to become an obsolete practice. Quite a few wells are now being fraced with liquid nitrogen gel, liquid carbon dioxide gel, propane gel, and liquified natural gas. This is the frac fluid of the future that will eliminate the need for using water. It does less damage to the formation because it is either an inert gas (nitrogen), a solvent to oil (carbon dioxide, propane and methane) or is native to the reservoir (propane and natural gas). Most water fracs damage the formation by the water being adsorbed into the shale. This occludes porosity and makes the well harder to produce. It only works because it is cheap- not because it is efficient and ideal for the rock.
" or for all we know they’re puking [the plastic] or pooping it out, and there’s no long-term damage. We don’t know.”
If this is the case, then the plastic is eventually going to buried under sediments, and at some point will either be subducted where it will convert to various metamorphic rock, or become molten and mix with water and magma and be erupted as igneous rock, or perhaps it will undergo catagenesis and be converted back to petroleum and natural gas, from whence it came.
Tech Times headlines this as "Climate change prompts Emperor penguins to find new breeding grounds"
The researchers press report is titled like this: "New research using satellite images reveals that emperor penguins are more willing to relocate than previously thought"
The reporter from Tech Times basically lied to create a headline. If you read the original press release it says nothing about global climate change. The researchers did not make this conclusion- the fiction writer that wrote the article made it up.
http://cse.umn.edu/admin/comm/...
Yes, climate change has and always will happen, but short of an asteroid strike it's never happened this fast before. Humanity needs the world the way it currently is, otherwise it will face massive issues on top of the normal issues faced every day across the world.
1. Where did you learn that? Are you aware that when examining data like the rock record it is hard to get resolution below about 50,000 years? I have done advanced magnetostratigraphic studies and I assure you we have NO way of know how fast climate may have changed in the past (below 50K years +/- about 20K years) simply because we cannot date things that precisely when we go past the limits of methods like carbon dating.
2. The human race in some form has been around for a couple of million years now. Climate has changed dramatically over that period. While the coastal cities and other relatively new infrastructure might be poorly thought out for long term climate changes, the species will likely survive any amount of climate change variability it has seen in the past. Plus, one man's "massive issue" is simply another man's "massive opportunity" which is kind of the way I see the whole AGW debate these days- those who are trying to make a certain opportunity for political or economic gain are taking advantage of the idea, while those opposed are trying to maintain status quo and resist what they see as exploitation. Science doesn't take sides- only politicians do that.
3. The 'overwhelming' evidence is just that- evidence- and it remains woefully incomplete. I study paleoclimate of the Cretaceous and often work as far back as the Mississippian. We have very little evidence because we have only a tiny and statistically invalid sample of climate records for this planet.
I am saying the tank cars explode because the crude has more volatiles in it. That is the current hypothesis anyway.
And I agree with you that the refinery probably penalizes them for higher natural gas liquids content. So despite what the article says this is probably not a devious plan to get more money by "watering down" the crude. It is a way of avoiding the hassle and expense of getting rid of the NGL in an area that has no infrastructure for that. That is the problem that needs to be solved, and perhaps they do need to use a higher class of tanker car, above a Class 3, which is unpressurized. That is probably the other issue is that 60% of the tank cars available are these Class 3 cars. So if the railroad can't bring higher rated cars, they may have decided to just call it Class 3 and hope for the best. That has proven to be unwise, after the explosion in Canada that wiped out a town, and a couple of other rail accidents.
"Obama can only stop the pipeline crossing the border from Canada. If they want to build it from ND to the Gulf refineries he couldn't do anything about it."
Wrong! As soon as a pipeline crosses a state line it is regulated by the Federal government and will require approval from Federal regulators. FERC commission members are all appointed by the President. Obama has total control over this, subject only to Senate approval of the appointees.
In the US oil typically sells at a marker price MINUS a differential. There are many different small oil markets in the US crude market. Few operators get WTI prices outside of Texas and OklahomaNote that Williston Basin (Bakken) is one of the lower prices. One reason these operators now prefer to use rail is that they are selling to West Coast and East Coast refineries like Seattle and New Jersey where they get much higher prices than the Midwest US. Here are crude oil prices for 3/07 in $/bbl.
West Texas Intermediate 99.20
Central Montana 90.85
Northwest Montana Sour 83.25
Williston Basin Sweet 84.19
Williston Basin Sour 74.58
Wyoming General Sour 71.75
Wyoming Sweet (Powder Rv Bsn) 91.08
Colorado D-J Basin 86.30
Four Corners 97.74
Nebraska 87.58
Southeastern Colorado 89.50
Western Colorado 87.38
Kansas Sweet NW 90.75
Kansas Sweet SW 91.00
Operators in Louisiana and some parts of Texas manage to get Brent prices, which is what most of Europe's oil is based on as a marker crude. California has its own market, based largely on Alaska Crude, and all of the West Coast of the US is priced relative to Prudhoe Bay (Alaska).
The issue is likely not "extra" profit, but more correcty extra cost. Propane and other light components like butane and pentane would have to be removed by a separator, and because there is a limited (mostly none) market for the lighter liquids in the Bakken area, they are forced to burn it. This is of course stupid, as it could be used to run equipment by those operators, but they are overwhelmed with gas production as a byproduct of the oil production and are flaring large quantities already.
Of course, this flaring still happens all over the world and one reason that northern Russia is one of the brightest places in the night sky is that Russian oil production is notorious for flaring natural gas rather than using it (probably one reason the Arctic is seeing warming). At least in the Bakken there is now pressure on the industry to end the flaring, and that will force them to start saving this resource and might even make them a little money that they are now throwing away because of the lack of gas transport infrastructure. Believe it or not, the pressure to not flare is coming from a profit motive, that is the state and private landowners who see a resource being wasted that they are not earning royalties from.
The best solution may be just to use better tank cars, since tank cars carrying 100% propane roll down the rails every day and they don't seem to have this problem.
Yes, and even your source says you are wrong. "because roughly 60 percent of deaths by gun are due to suicides" Last time I checked it was not illegal to commit suicide in the USA. That reduces your number to 7200/60,000,000 which by my calculation means 99.99988%, which is a little more than 99.999% did nothing wrong. So the original poster was actually being conservative and you may be confused about the meaning of an order of magnitude.
"All support and service for Windows XP and Office 2003 shuts down on April 8. "
So?
It that supposed to scare me?
I have been using MS since MSDOS 1.0 and I have NEVER used MS support. I'm even suspicious of most of the updates and seldom use them. I have one machine on XP, another on Win7 and one on Win 8 which I hate. I'm still mad about the $3000 hardware peripheral that I lost when I left Win2K behind. That hi-resolution medium format film scanner requires a SCSI card to run, and software that won't run on anything newer than W2K so I keep thinking about building a machine with W2K just to run it.
Slashdot Mirror
You really should just look on eBay. I see several listed.
Just to add to that, there are a couple of characteristics of measles that makes it much more appropriate to require vaccination than say a flu shot. Measles virus is transmitted through the air, and can have a very long latency time in the air. The original carrier can contaminate a room and then be gone for two hours or more while the infectious virus remains in the room. Plus, the measles carrier does not have to exhibit symptoms yet for the virus to be communicable. Washing your hands is not going to protect you from measles.
I work in an industry where I travel outside the US fairly often for work. Since many countries REQUIRE vaccinations for quite a few things just to get a visa, and quite a few more are recommended, I do not find it especially onerous that Disney might require vaccinations for appropriate diseases, which of course will make Disney responsible for the cost. I would assume at this point that Disney's insurance carriers will require this as the liability will likely be high and they may be considered negligent. Measles can cause pregnancy loss, bronchitis, laryngitis, pneumonia, and ear infections (which could cause long-term hearing loss). I don't get a choice about drug tests and even if the drugs I am found taking are legal in the state I am located in, I am still just as fired if I fail the test. How is requiring vaccinations from diseases that you are almost certain to catch if exposed to and not vaccinated against any different in principle (i.e. public/worker safety) than requirements for drug testing?
"We're spending 3.5 percent of US GDP to subsidize fossil fuel exploration, drilling, processing, shipping, and use. With our tax dollars, our public lands, our infrastructure priorities. Just getting rid of all the tax subsidies, the artificial low land and sea lease rates for drilling, the tax incentives for business, would mostly fix it." Citation required. Revenue from oil and gas alone is the second largest source of revenue to the Federal government behind the IRS. Most states also earn huge portions of their revenue from taxing oil and gas directly as it is produced in the form of severance taxes. I am unaware of any tax policy that grants favor to oil and gas operators that is not also available to other businesses that are not producing oil and gas. Some studies show that the oil and gas industry employs over 5% of the US workforce and creates about 7.5% of US GDP. Yet, you somehow think that half of that is being thrown into tax subsidies that you probably cannot reference.
If you really want to reduce carbon from the carbon cycle, find a way to increase the numbers of ocean plankton, along with other marine organisms that have been responsible for sequestering 99.9% of the carbon on the entire planet into the form of sedimentary rock.
I have bad news for you. ALL carbon is part of the carbon cycle. Even the carbon in limestone, which accounts for 99.9% of the carbon on the planet, is part of the carbon cycle, and it almost all got there through biogenic pathways. Even the carbon in "fossil fuel" came from living organisms. You really don't have a clear understanding of the carbon cycle.
"Although the extent of the US experience is unlikely to be replicated elsewhere, and US estimates of economically recoverable quantities remain a matter of debate, shale gas has the potential to become a widely accessible global fuel."
Only the last part of that sentence is true. US estimates of economically recoverable quantities are conservative if anything. In reality, with the proper gas and oil prices, the US has far more than official estimates from EIA, IEA, or USGS, all of whom are dependent on access to data, most of which is proprietary that they will never see. Economics changes reserves estimates each quarter, so whenever someone says economically recoverable, they are confusing the issue and not really telling you a number that is related to total resource. Over time most resource that is uneconomic is likely to become economic, so those number are always "debatable" by definition. He is being disingenuous with this statement.
US shale gas can be replicated elsewhere and will be. Russia currently has little openly expressed interest in shale gas, but probably has more reserves than North America. Saudi Arabia is pursuing shale gas. Argentina's shale gas and oil has been very successful, but the government has made outside investors nervous and slowed the process. China has the resource, but because of lack of infrastructure, will be slow to move forward. India likewise has shale gas but currently has a regulatory regime that makes it uneconomic. Regulations and politics are the primary obstacle of shale gas in many countries. Those may be hard to change but do not represent impossible obstacles. Shale gas will become a worldwide phenomenon, it is just a matter of time, probably decades. Shale gas has the potential to free much of the developing world from dependence on imported oil and gas and allow them to develop industrial bases of their own. All that is needed is the political will to allow it to happen.
"Some of the other categories of unconventional gas—tight gas, coal bed methane, aquifer gas, and gas hydrates—dwarf shale gas in magnitude." Not true except for gas hydrates, which so far have not proven to be recoverable in commercial quantities. The difficulty is their lack of concentration, as well as their location primarily below permafrost and the continental shelf. He forgets to mention, while pointing out the methane emissions of the oil and gas industry, that coal mines are actually some of the largest emitters of methane. The recently published methane hot spot map of the US showed the largest methane emissions in the US are from the largest strip mine in North America, in the Four Corners Region. Coal emits methane as soon as it is uncovered, and continues to emit methane during transport in open rail cars, and in the large storage piles where it is kept near power plants.
"Moreover, methane, the chief component of natural gas, is itself a heat-trapping greenhouse gas with 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. If total methane leakage—from drilling through end use—is greater than about 4 percent, that could negate any climate benefits of switching from coal and oil to gas." This is a very misleading statement. Methane has a half life of less than 12 years, and only has the multiple he refers to if considered over a 100 year period. Basically this is statistical manipulation. In any case, coal emits more methane than natural gas drilling (yet he mentions the "huge" potential of coal bed methane) so switching from coal to natural gas will always result in a climate change benefit.
"Accounting for the climate impacts of methane leakages eliminated all climate mitigation benefits." The only studies that have concluded this have all been discredited by later studies, often based simply on the methodology of obtaining the methane leakage numbers. One study actually included emis
Bullshit. Beach erosion happens with or without rising sea levels. In California the beaches are famous for having different sand levels between summer and winter simply because of the change in the size and frequency of waves on the Pacific Ocean. Long-shore drift is a well known process that assures that beaches will erode without changing sea level. It has always functioned and always will as long as the Earth keeps rotating and wind patterns create waves.
What few people who live near or on beaches ever understand is that they live in a temporary and transient environment. Sand on all beaches moves constantly, and long-shore currents move sand along the shore until the sand reaches a channel. After the sand moves into a channel, it moves into deeper ocean waters where it is lost for economic purposes, but will serve just fine to create future sandstone deposits. The reason the sand on beaches is being deplenished was not mentioned in the article at all. The beach sand has had its supply blocked by anthropogenic engineering, such as dams on rivers, channelized rivers, levees, and many other structures. If you dam a river, the dam catches all the sand that that river would have delivered to beaches through its delta. It you channelize a river, like the Mississippi River for example, the sand supply is delivered to deep ocean water, and no longer deposited on the river delta. Much of the cause of "rising sea levels" is actually from this problem. River deltas like southern Louisiana have built up miles thick deposits of loosely consolidated sands and clays and gradually subside as they compact naturally. Unless the river is allowed to flood these areas like it always did, there is not enough sediment supply to keep these places above sea level. Along the Texas Gulf Coast the problem has been that virtually every river that crosses the state has been dammed, and some of them have more than one dam. That means very little sand is making it to the beaches of Texas, and gives some alarmists an excuse to claim sea level is rising. West Coast beaches, and East Coast beaches have much the same problem. Rising sea level does not always mean the water level is rising- very often it means the land is sinking, or in the case of beaches, simply being naturally eroded and carried into the ocean depths.
It is not only possible to make sand from rock it is done in many places. Sandstone is rock made from sand, and the sand grains have already been rounded and weathered by ancient oceans, beaches, and rivers. Crushing it makes rock into sand that is just like the beach sand it once was.
I have no problem believing that climate is changing. I have seen millions of years of evidence for that. I even have no problem believing that anthropological climate change is significant, although my own informed opinion is that it began when agriculture became a widespread practice, not when oil and gas became commonly used. I do have a problem with the concept that there is "scientific consensus" about climate change. First of all, that term often includes many scientists who did not study hard science, especially when it is from the IPCC. There is much more nuance in the scientific community than is ever acknowledged in the media. I for one, believe (and have millions of years of evidence at my disposal) that Milankovitch Cycles are much more significant of a factor in climate change than greenhouse effects. I also believe that albedo is much more significant. I have built computer climate models. I understand the data (and see many many problems with it) and I understand the numerous assumptions that go into building any model.
I realize some will dismiss me when I say this- but I tell oil companies where to drill wells. I apply millions of dollars of data to that effort, and have access to databases that number over one million wells in some cases. I have the best computer software at my disposal that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and I have had access to supercomputers in times past. I have millions of dollars worth of very detailed seismic data to work with. I look at the rock with scanning electron microscopes and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on laboratory tests. I use satellite data, and surface geochemisty, and I fly planes around detecting hydrocarbons with spectrometers. I model everything in time, tracing events over millions of years. I work with a team of geologists and engineers. Each time we drill an exploration well, we reach a consensus. And probably nine out of ten times, our consensus, based on engineering studies, geologic studies, and seismic studies is WRONG. Even the largest oil company in the world only has a 1 in 3 success case on all wells drilled (and that includes wells that are much less risky than exploration wells). With complicated Earth systems like geology or climate, consensus is not a guarantee of anything. It is a group opinion, often obtained after much interaction where each individual has compromised by trying to consider the data brought to the table by other workers. Consensus is not science- it might be political science- but it is not an indication of fact or reality.
Contacts, and sometime headhunters will get you interviews. My current job was introduced to me by a headhunter and then my existing contacts inside the organization did the rest. Not online forms. I have had two recent contacts from company HR departments that already had my online application. They were calling me to say they had found me on LinkedIn and wanted to know if I would submit a resume. One of them had accepted my online application back in February and sent me a generic email response the same day saying I would not be considered for the job. They are still trying to fill the job and called me because they were "impressed" by me. I told them they had my resume, and had already rejected it. They spent another two weeks just trying to arrange a phone interview and I simply stopped answering the emails coming from several people in HR. How hard can it be to pick up the damn phone and call me? The other one which is based outside the US has had my resume in their system for ten years, which I have regularly updated, and has even interviewed me twice before. HR called me to see if I would send them a resume and interview for a job. I knew they would not hire me for because I am too old (this company has a mandatory retirement age of 60). The HR rep sheepishly confirmed they do in fact have a mandatory retirement age of 60, that is set by the Kingdom, and not their company (who cares?). They used to tell me they could not hire me because I did not have enough experience. Now I have all the experience they want, but I am too old. They had no idea I was already in their system and that they already had my DOB. How hard can it be to run a query on job applicants that have exceeded the mandatory age of retirement? Obviously LinkedIn is their go-to system, not their internal resume database. I agree that the online forms are maddening, but I always approach the task with the knowledge that it will never make a difference. It may be used to cover due diligence and get some disclosures out of the way, but chances are they will make you sign all that stuff again because they know their online system is a digital version of the round file. It will never get you an interview in my experience.
I have both an iPhone for work and a Droid 2 Global. Both have capacitive screens. Only the Droid 2 Global with a slide out keyboard is functional for me. I can only use the slideout. I can read email on the iPhone, but can't reply. Why you say? Some days my skin is simply not recognized by capacitive screens, I can touch the screen for several seconds before it reacts. At times I have to move my fingers around to get the screen to recognize my touch. The Apple is almost worthless to me and might as well be a brick that I am forced to carry around. I often have trouble unlocking it with the screen. The Droid is only better because it has a slide out keyboard. It too has problems with the touch screen not working. I may be a small percentage, but there are people who cannot use touch screens. I even have trouble using some ATM's.
These are the same airguns that have been used for many decades in ocean waters everywhere in the world. I have watched sea lions playing in the towed array of air guns behind a survey ship as they are operating. Sound levels of these guns are comparable to the noise made by a tanker and are actually lower than the low frequency sonar used by Navies all over the world. Whales and other marine mammals are quite capable of avoiding the noise, and normally do just that. The Navies of the world have been making much more noise without any environmental hysteria for decades.
http://sciencenotes.ucsc.edu/9...
The idea that renewable energy will replace these subsidies in those economies is ludricous. Small farms that depend on fossil fuel for subsistence farming, small fishermen who depend on subsidized fuel to power their boats, and many other small businesses simply cannot substitute "renewable energy" for diesel power. Thousands of cars that burn cheap gasoline (Venezuela) or cheap natural gas (Iraq) are not going to be suddenly fueled by batteries charged from solar and wind power. Economies that derive most of the national revenue (the Middle East) from oil and gas production owned by the State, are not going to find a new source of revenue to feed and cloth their population with by generating solar and wind power. Their conclusion could not be more naive or more unrealistic.
The study makes a fallacious conclusion. It ignores the fact that people with scientific training are trained to be skeptics. Once you can find the holes in "proven research" and realize that expressions like "97% of all climate scientists" are bullshit because they do not define who climate scientists actually are- it is easy to dismiss many scientific conclusions and continue to hold beliefs that one knows are simply beliefs and not facts. As an example, a large number of scientists until very recently believed that oil and gas production in the United States had passed its peak production and the science supported that conclusion. At the same time a smaller number of skeptical scientists who were willing to accept a new geologic paradigm regarding oil and gas expulsion were working hard to find the oil that has now put the US in the top ranking spot for world oil production. Science is often wrong and those who change scientific belief are generally in the minority at the beginning of the change. Good scientists know that. Politicians, and those who are more inclined to spread their own agenda, either don't understand that, or ignore it. Science thrives on falsification of the proven. If there is a generally accepted norm that I do not agree with....it does not mean my political or religious bias is the reason.....it simply means that I do not consider the evidence conclusive based on my scientific knowledge and experience. If that happens to mean I agree with Republicans or Democrats, that is only a coincidence. Correlation is not causation.
First of all, injection wells are not "fracking" (which is properly spelled fracing) and injection wells used for disposal of wastewater are not injecting only water from hydraulic fracturing. There are thousands of wells drilled with traditional vertical drilling methods in Oklahoma that produce water. There are wells that produce 90% water and 10% oil for most of the life of the well and this is common in some formations in Oklahoma (e.g. Mississippi Lime). That water has to be disposed of because it has high salinity- it was once ocean water- and the salinity is hard to deal with economically in traditional municipal wastewater treatment methods. In fact the aerospace industry and many other high-tech industries use disposal wells for disposing of various waste material. All of these disposal wells are regulated by the EPA as Class 2 wells. These injection well operators are contractors, providing a service to hundreds of different clients, mostly oil and gas, but not exclusively. They have operated these businesses since the 1940's (although at that time there were even fewer regulations and some of those disposal wells turned into Superfund sites (Southern California is one of those). Large amounts of the waste recovered by skimming and cleanup crews from the Macondo spill was injected into disposal wells.
The oil and gas industry is recycling wastewater from hydraulic fracturing in many cases, but sadly not every operator can or will do it. Here are some examples in a WSJ article: http://online.wsj.com/news/art... There are companies that can recycle frac water to the point it is potable and a few are doing that. There are also companies that deliver their waste water to municipal sewage plant operators that can bring the water to standards that allow it to be discharged into surface rivers.
1. I would acknowledge and even argue that the oil and gas industry needs to find more methods of recycling frac water. However, the conventional vertically drilled wells that have been around for many decades produce more wastewater than fracing in some areas. Examples are Mississippi Lime wells in Oklahoma and Kansas, Austin Chalk wells in Texas and Louisiana, and Phosphoria wells in the Rocky Mountains. Even the historically drilled well targets in Pennsylvania and Ohio have large quantities of water production associated with the oil. I think one reason the oil and gas industry is not reacting quickly to this is that they have ALWAYS had this much water to dispose of and the practice of hydraulic fracturing looks like more of the same to them.
2. The EPA is doing a lousy job of monitoring these Class 2 wells. As soon as slight tremors are measured pumping needs to stop. Seismic surveys need to be done around the wells that have proven to be an issue and new wells need this added to the permitting requirement. Yes that will add $10 million or more to the cost of these wells, but the alternative is public hew and cry about the bogeyman (which is how the public views earthquakes, and most other natural phenomenon), and some legitimate concern about damages caused by these tremors to nearby structures.
3. My own opinion is that fracturing with water is going to become an obsolete practice. Quite a few wells are now being fraced with liquid nitrogen gel, liquid carbon dioxide gel, propane gel, and liquified natural gas. This is the frac fluid of the future that will eliminate the need for using water. It does less damage to the formation because it is either an inert gas (nitrogen), a solvent to oil (carbon dioxide, propane and methane) or is native to the reservoir (propane and natural gas). Most water fracs damage the formation by the water being adsorbed into the shale. This occludes porosity and makes the well harder to produce. It only works because it is cheap- not because it is efficient and ideal for the rock.
" or for all we know they’re puking [the plastic] or pooping it out, and there’s no long-term damage. We don’t know.” If this is the case, then the plastic is eventually going to buried under sediments, and at some point will either be subducted where it will convert to various metamorphic rock, or become molten and mix with water and magma and be erupted as igneous rock, or perhaps it will undergo catagenesis and be converted back to petroleum and natural gas, from whence it came.
Tech Times headlines this as "Climate change prompts Emperor penguins to find new breeding grounds" The researchers press report is titled like this: "New research using satellite images reveals that emperor penguins are more willing to relocate than previously thought" The reporter from Tech Times basically lied to create a headline. If you read the original press release it says nothing about global climate change. The researchers did not make this conclusion- the fiction writer that wrote the article made it up. http://cse.umn.edu/admin/comm/...
Yes, climate change has and always will happen, but short of an asteroid strike it's never happened this fast before. Humanity needs the world the way it currently is, otherwise it will face massive issues on top of the normal issues faced every day across the world.
1. Where did you learn that? Are you aware that when examining data like the rock record it is hard to get resolution below about 50,000 years? I have done advanced magnetostratigraphic studies and I assure you we have NO way of know how fast climate may have changed in the past (below 50K years +/- about 20K years) simply because we cannot date things that precisely when we go past the limits of methods like carbon dating. 2. The human race in some form has been around for a couple of million years now. Climate has changed dramatically over that period. While the coastal cities and other relatively new infrastructure might be poorly thought out for long term climate changes, the species will likely survive any amount of climate change variability it has seen in the past. Plus, one man's "massive issue" is simply another man's "massive opportunity" which is kind of the way I see the whole AGW debate these days- those who are trying to make a certain opportunity for political or economic gain are taking advantage of the idea, while those opposed are trying to maintain status quo and resist what they see as exploitation. Science doesn't take sides- only politicians do that. 3. The 'overwhelming' evidence is just that- evidence- and it remains woefully incomplete. I study paleoclimate of the Cretaceous and often work as far back as the Mississippian. We have very little evidence because we have only a tiny and statistically invalid sample of climate records for this planet.
I am saying the tank cars explode because the crude has more volatiles in it. That is the current hypothesis anyway. And I agree with you that the refinery probably penalizes them for higher natural gas liquids content. So despite what the article says this is probably not a devious plan to get more money by "watering down" the crude. It is a way of avoiding the hassle and expense of getting rid of the NGL in an area that has no infrastructure for that. That is the problem that needs to be solved, and perhaps they do need to use a higher class of tanker car, above a Class 3, which is unpressurized. That is probably the other issue is that 60% of the tank cars available are these Class 3 cars. So if the railroad can't bring higher rated cars, they may have decided to just call it Class 3 and hope for the best. That has proven to be unwise, after the explosion in Canada that wiped out a town, and a couple of other rail accidents.
"Obama can only stop the pipeline crossing the border from Canada. If they want to build it from ND to the Gulf refineries he couldn't do anything about it." Wrong! As soon as a pipeline crosses a state line it is regulated by the Federal government and will require approval from Federal regulators. FERC commission members are all appointed by the President. Obama has total control over this, subject only to Senate approval of the appointees.
In the US oil typically sells at a marker price MINUS a differential. There are many different small oil markets in the US crude market. Few operators get WTI prices outside of Texas and OklahomaNote that Williston Basin (Bakken) is one of the lower prices. One reason these operators now prefer to use rail is that they are selling to West Coast and East Coast refineries like Seattle and New Jersey where they get much higher prices than the Midwest US. Here are crude oil prices for 3/07 in $/bbl. West Texas Intermediate 99.20 Central Montana 90.85 Northwest Montana Sour 83.25 Williston Basin Sweet 84.19 Williston Basin Sour 74.58 Wyoming General Sour 71.75 Wyoming Sweet (Powder Rv Bsn) 91.08 Colorado D-J Basin 86.30 Four Corners 97.74 Nebraska 87.58 Southeastern Colorado 89.50 Western Colorado 87.38 Kansas Sweet NW 90.75 Kansas Sweet SW 91.00 Operators in Louisiana and some parts of Texas manage to get Brent prices, which is what most of Europe's oil is based on as a marker crude. California has its own market, based largely on Alaska Crude, and all of the West Coast of the US is priced relative to Prudhoe Bay (Alaska). The issue is likely not "extra" profit, but more correcty extra cost. Propane and other light components like butane and pentane would have to be removed by a separator, and because there is a limited (mostly none) market for the lighter liquids in the Bakken area, they are forced to burn it. This is of course stupid, as it could be used to run equipment by those operators, but they are overwhelmed with gas production as a byproduct of the oil production and are flaring large quantities already. Of course, this flaring still happens all over the world and one reason that northern Russia is one of the brightest places in the night sky is that Russian oil production is notorious for flaring natural gas rather than using it (probably one reason the Arctic is seeing warming). At least in the Bakken there is now pressure on the industry to end the flaring, and that will force them to start saving this resource and might even make them a little money that they are now throwing away because of the lack of gas transport infrastructure. Believe it or not, the pressure to not flare is coming from a profit motive, that is the state and private landowners who see a resource being wasted that they are not earning royalties from. The best solution may be just to use better tank cars, since tank cars carrying 100% propane roll down the rails every day and they don't seem to have this problem.
Yes, and even your source says you are wrong. "because roughly 60 percent of deaths by gun are due to suicides" Last time I checked it was not illegal to commit suicide in the USA. That reduces your number to 7200/60,000,000 which by my calculation means 99.99988%, which is a little more than 99.999% did nothing wrong. So the original poster was actually being conservative and you may be confused about the meaning of an order of magnitude.
"All support and service for Windows XP and Office 2003 shuts down on April 8. " So? It that supposed to scare me? I have been using MS since MSDOS 1.0 and I have NEVER used MS support. I'm even suspicious of most of the updates and seldom use them. I have one machine on XP, another on Win7 and one on Win 8 which I hate. I'm still mad about the $3000 hardware peripheral that I lost when I left Win2K behind. That hi-resolution medium format film scanner requires a SCSI card to run, and software that won't run on anything newer than W2K so I keep thinking about building a machine with W2K just to run it.