dagblog - Comments for "Doom is Normal"

Heh! Don't complain, Donal.

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:47:00 +0000

In reply to It is always interesting to

Heh! Don't complain, Donal. Welcome the traffic. You might even win over some of those deniers and such.

It is always interesting to

Donal — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:45:20 +0000

It is always interesting to see who is reading one's posts. Some blogger has sloppily attributed Greer's quote to me so he can associate Greer's description with my title.

And the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which appears to be a climate change denial site, has reposted that article as Weasels Of Peak Oil Cult Scramble To Explain Absence Of Doom.

And so it goes.

My post made it in The Oil

Donal — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:32:27 +0000

In reply to Doom is Normal

My post made it in The Oil Drum's daily Drumbeat, and I found this article mentioned in the comments:

Why energy journalism is so bad

... my colleague Christopher Mims pointed up a sharp discrepancy between three recent stories by Reuters, published between November 21 and 24.

The first reported Saudi Aramco’s CEO Khalid al-Falih as saying that unconventional oil (heavy oil, synthetic oil from shale and tar sands, coal-to-liquids and so on) had eliminated global supply concerns, and would rise from 2.3 million barrels per day (mbpd) today to 8.4 mbpd by 2035. This would shift the global balance of power, he said, and reduce U.S. dependence on oil imports. Further, he expected conventional oil supply from Brazil and Iraq to rise. All of this was by way of explaining why Saudi Arabia had recently halted its ongoing $100 billion program to expand production capacity beyond its claimed 12.5 mbpd current capacity, and would not seek to expand it to 15 mbpd (a fact that was already widely assumed by most who follow the energy markets, but apparently was still considered newsworthy).

The second said that oil prices should remain high because global demand had remained strong, and would reach more than 89 mbpd this year according to the IEA. (The International Energy Agency, or IEA, based in Paris and serving at the pleasure of the 28 industrialized countries in the OECD, currently shows 88.7 mbpd for Q3 2011 under a liberal definition of “oil” which includes biofuels and certain types of natural gas liquids. The Energy Information Administration, or EIA, based in Washington D.C. and serving under the U.S. Department of Energy, shows 86.7 mbpd under a more restrictive definition, which excludes biofuels, non-associated natural gas liquids, and other components.) But while demand has been strong, the article noted that supply has been “inconsistent,” citing the loss of 1.6 mbpd from Libya, and various “hiccups in production in Russia, Britain, Norway and Nigeria.”

The third suggested that high oil prices “could strangle economic hopes,” and quoted the IEA’s chief economist Fatih Birol: “I hope that colleagues from the producing countries are also looking at the market indicators carefully, including the diminishing OECD stocks levels and the fragility of the global economic situation.” In his view, too little worldwide investment in oil supply would keep prices high enough to stifle the recovery of the global economy.

So which is it? How can three stories from a single source, published over a five-day span, simultaneously claim that supply is adequate and inadequate; and that prices would remain high due to strong demand, but would be so high that they would destroy demand?

I've been writing a long

Dan Kervick — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:40:19 +0000

In reply to Doom is Normal

I've been writing a long essay that is definitely hopeful. I've been working on it for about a month now, but it should be done in a couple of days. I'm not sure yet where it will be posted or published, but I'll keep you all posted.

Part of the sense of doom is the feeling that A, B, C, D and E are all screwed up, but we are only permitted to work on fixing D and E. We just need to get more ambitious.

What in the hell did people

Richard Day — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:27:18 +0000

In reply to Doom is Normal

What in the hell did people think the purpose of the progressive income tax as well the estate tax was?

It does not take a graduate degree in economics to figure out what has been going on the past three decades or so.

If you are rich you can make a lot of money and pay capital gains tax.

If you are rich you can put money into scores of trusts, pay no taxes and insure that your grandchildren will never have to work.

Why bother. What we need is a new emergence of an old hero:

The news is terrible. Is the

Donal — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:25:24 +0000

In reply to Doom is Normal

The news is terrible. Is the world really doomed?

The economy's bust, the climate's on the brink and even the arts are full of gloom. Has there ever been an era so bleak?

The economic and political shocks of the last five years, and of this year in particular, have changed how many westerners see the world. "The impossible is becoming possible," as [Slavo] Žižek puts it in Living in the End Times, and he doesn't mean in a good way. Gray says: "We've moved from a delusional optimism to a sense of intractable difficulties: resource scarcity and enormous debts; the erosion of bourgeois life; the inability of politicians to solve big problems; the realisation that the economic problems of the 70s weren't really solved; the realisation that the window for doing something about climate change – the next five years – will be entirely occupied with trying to restart economic growth."
...
Žižek argues that over the past five years the west has suffered a form of bereavement. To describe the resulting mindset, he uses the famous "five stages of grief" model devised in 1969 by the Swiss-American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The current combination of public doominess and desperate-looking political summits certainly seems to feature the middle three. Gray sums up the prevailing mood more succinctly: "People are afraid – for good, practical, experientially based reasons."