Lockheed Martin Files EEStor Patent

The promise of EEStor has just jumped another notch. First, Lockheed which has an arrangement with EEStor is not firing off patent applications like this unless their confidence in the technology is very high. There is little incentive in been premature. You can loose rights that may become valuable decades from now when someone else solves the problem. This patent is a strong indication that they think that they can deliver.

Secondly, and suddenly we are talking about an energy skin. This is huge. To start with, the car battery can become part of the exterior shell. It may even provide other advantages such as shock resistance. In this case it is integral to the body armor. This is real star wars armor.

I am actually more encouraged by this news than any news from EEStor directly. The threshold for disclosure is hugely higher to anything necessary with a startup such as EEStor. All the right questions will have been asked. I even suspect that proof of concept samples were wandering around before the patent was drafted.

We also have another reason for the present level of secrecy. EEStor surely wants product development money from the military and that means subjecting themselves to the type of security that Lockheed Martin lives with every day.

Science fiction writers can now describe an armored combatant packing enough energy in the armor to power a hand held microwave lasing weapon. We can even do it all in white.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Lockheed Martin Patent Application Includes EEStor EESU

http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/images/PCT-IMAGES/24122008/US2008059684_24122008_gz_en.x4-b.jpg

Another layer of EEStor mystery was removed on Dec 24, 2008 when a patent application belonging to Lockheed Martin was published via the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for a "Garment Including Electrical Energy Storage Unit." Thus, a new reason for Lockheed Martin's reticence to comment on EEStor technology has emerged: discussing it too early could jeopardize Intellectual Property Lockheed wishes to take a hold of via this and perhaps other patent initiatives.

The application goes on to describe a new form of utility garment that includes body armor among other things. Specifically, the application discusses that the electrical energy storage unit "substantially conforms to an armour plate." The plate in turn may be "contoured to better fit a person wearing armor."

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the application is that the EESU is described as "soft" and apparently aids the resistance of the armour:

The soft nature of electrical energy storage layers 203 and 401 a-401 h, relative to armor plate 201 , causes a ballistic round or fragment to spiral upon striking one of layers 203 and 401 a-401 h, which provides an enhancement to the ballistic resistance of armor plate 201

The application goes on to describe power redundancy in the overall garment:

Preferably, the electrical energy storage layer comprises a plurality of sections so that, if one of the plurality of sections is damaged, the other sections of the plurality of sections remain operable. Two or more sections of the plurality of sections of the electrical energy storage layer may be electrically coupled, either in parallel or in series. The body armor includes one or more connectors electrically coupled with the electrical energy storage layer and/or with one or more of the sections of the electrical energy storage layer. The electrical connectors provide access to electrical power stored in the electrical energy storage layer.

The electrical storage layer sits outside the armor layer.

The application includes generality for a lithium ion storage unit as well as a fuel cell storage for recharging the eesu or Li battery and names Toby D Thomas and David L. Hoelscher as inventors. Die hard EEStory followers will recall that the Department of Defense Wearable power competition that took place this past summer listed Hoelscher as it's team lead. Lockheed listed this URL as it's home website.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIHVNdcH0nnLFIyKHoIgVi7ohCPkEX7GrNjYonFcKlbVf76PD-hxbgM55TIbwlgDFZJ9ybOaNmQSuNC7iG4kAkwLzw7mkTUhqA9WL1_bfI_yHkunlFv_Tqvg0yL7WEcRT3snNfAIsY1qc/s1600-h/fig6.jpg

At the time of posting this article, Lockheed Martin was not available for comment.

Hamas Overreaches

A new year has begun and Hamas is paying the price for having an itchy trigger finger. For all of us who have lived with this confrontation, all our adult lives, it is hard to get too exercised about it all. The natural expectation is that a lot of rubble will be shaken up and then it will be quiet for a few more years. The balance of military power is simply too one sided.

What is different this time is that Hamas has gathered the hardliners to itself and has completely parted company with the PLO who has now become their enemies. The strategic balance has shifted. This is extraordinarily dangerous for Hamas.

They sponsor a form of Islam that must be rejected by Islam if Islam is to survive as a viable religion. It is a doctrine that rationalizes barbarism. Today, Islam in its fundamentalist form is the last vestige of barbarism anywhere on the globe. And just as we expunged the Nazi resurgence of western barbarism, the resurgence of Islamic barbarism will be expunged.

Hamas has positioned themselves to be erased. The calculation of the Israeli army is now very simple. Destroy Hamas root and bough as Nazism was destroyed. Then allow the PLO to create an independent Palestinian homeland under agreements already worked out and blocked by Hamas. This assures the emergence of a secular Palestinian state that will be capable of achieving peace.

The payoff for peace in this ancient land has always been the rapid emergence of a super city such as New York or Shanghai. Such a super city will make everyone wonder what all the fuss was.

So this is both a hopeful and fearful time. You can be sure that the Israelis have made the strategic calculation. There is also no better time to do this than right now while the USA is in political transition and is preoccupied with that, just in case the cleansing lasts an extra month. And there will be no PLO diplomats arguing for a cease fire.

The last few days has seen the Israeli air force degrade Hamas command and control and logistical support. The remaining step is a house by house search of the whole city destroying pockets of resistance and the collection of activists. Hamas can be counted on to fight and to try to maximize the civilian deaths even when surrender is a viable tactic.

A rational leader would do it on the balance of what we know. The only variable is the current Israeli political dynamic which has tended to produce hesitancy over decisiveness. Of course, that is a viable and sometimes an admirable option when you are an 800 pound gorilla.

I wrote this on Friday and on Saturday the Israelis went in. I expect this action can last until there is no one left to shoot back and I think the possible diplomatic support is now as isolated as Hamas. This will be the first time that the Israelis are not facing a credible diplomatic battle. They do not have forever to get the job done, but they will certainly have sufficient time to do anything they want. And Yasser Arafat is not around to betray the Palestinians one more time. End Game?

On War

I used to think that there were many reasons for war. There is really only one cause of war. That is the promotion of ethic hatred to achieve personal aggrandization. The primary victims are mostly the men although the advent of WMD’s has changed that somewhat.

What has changed is that the idea of the melting pot has caught on around the world and is slowly dissolving away the emotive power of ethnicity. Intermarriage in particular is demolishing these barriers. I come from a world that was shocked at the idea of interracial marriage and resisted it. Today the president of the USA is a man who is about as extreme an example of interracial marriage as you could imagine and still live on Earth. His rise is not just the validation of the rights of all ethic groups to participate fully in political life, but a validation of a future hybrid humanity that transcends ethnicity.

The Romans solved their problems by the brutal expedient of uprooting the entire population and selling the breeders into slavery all over the empire. It did not always work, but the only exception was Judaism, and to be quite fair, the religion survived whereas the bloodlines are a lot more problematic. It is easy to understand the Arab resistance to the idea that a bunch of Franks and Slavs are their long lost brothers. Of course there are also a bunch of Bantus who claim to be Jewish. The reality is that religious conversion was very common and often very necessary if you wished to hang on to the old homestead. Only the leaders lacked that option and had the dedication to start over in a new tribe.

We are starting to understand all this a bit better and the ethnic bias is been bled away. Perhaps someday we will understand that what Hitler did was murder millions whose Saxon and Slavic ancestors converted to Judaism in a world were that allowed you to get a job outside serfdom. That does more to diminish the horrid ideas of Hitler than anything else that I could ever say.

We live in a rapidly connecting world that now rejects war and has internalized the lessons of Nazism and other power creeds. Resistance is rising to those power creeds and opposition is eroding away generation by generation. In most cases, no intervention is warranted as it is merely a case of waiting as worked so well for the USSR. It actually was the extreme example of a failed inflexible top down creed finally succumbing to its contradictions.

War has not ended but it is ending and will expire as the remaining ethnic confrontations stand down.

EEStor from Ecogeek

This short simple item from Ecogeek will help make the EEStor concept a little easier, although it says nothing about the real issues.

I notice commentators whining about the litany of missed delivery dates as if this actually casts doubt on what they are attempting. This is very extreme product development and very difficult. It they were actually meeting so called deadlines, I would be expecting a sham. Most folks cannot change a tire on time and on budget and this is a hundred times more problematic where you are creating a micron sized particle, that is coated no less and then using it to fabricate an electron absorbing layer of these powders and plastic binder.

It is the type of thing that is likely a bitch to do as a one off in a custom rig, whereas a piece of cake in a very expensive production line. Imagine a plasma screen done as a one off! You would be lucky to get proof of concept.

We are still been told very little how this works but we are certainly told what they can do and it is clearly important.

http://www.ecogeek.org/images/image/eestorpatent.jpg


EEStor Gets Patent on Breakthough Mystery Device

Written by Hank Green
Friday, 26 December 2008

Personally, I'm very excited that lithium ion batteries are finally getting advanced enough to find homes in automobiles. But a small company called EEStor is promising "Electronic Storage Units" that will be ten times lighter, hold ten times more power, and cost half as much as lithium ion batteries.

What's more, they'll be able hold enough power to drive a car for 300 miles, charge in less than five minutes (at charging stations, not at home outlets) and will be able to charge and recharge an infinite number of times.

If true, this isn't just great news for the auto industry...it's great news for consumer electronics and the power industry as well. The question is...is it true?

Well, one obstacle was overcome today, when EEStor was finally awarded a patent (PDF) on its technology. But a patent can be awarded for technology that doesn't work or isn't viable...they do it all the time. But now, at least, EEStor will be able to control the device if it turns out to be feasible.

It also opens up the window for all of us to look in on their mysterious chemistry a bit. According to the patent the device is a sort of capacitor that actually contains 31,353 separate capacitors in parallel. These nano-capacitors are basically a ceramic powder suspended in a plastic solution, and we're not going to pretend we understand why they can soak up so many electrons.

The patent does point out that any number of these nano-capacitors can be used in parallel, depending on the needs of the application. So, yes, if they begin manufacturing these things for cars, it won't be long before they're in your laptops and cell phones as well.

But the question of feasibility remains. They're already behind on their scheduled delivery to Zenn auto company (who currently has exclusive rights to use the storage units.) But Zenn apparently remains confident that they will have a vehicle on the roads using the technology by 2009.

I, for one, certainly hope so. But if they do, it's going to mess up a lot of other people's plans.

Gasoline Ration Cards

I have posted often on the pending oil supply crisis, now been briefly masked by the decline in demand caused by the global credit collapse. As credit begins to flow again as it is now, demand will quickly recover.

This returns us fairly swiftly to the inelastic supply conditions that permitted this past summer’s price rise to $145. I do not get any sense of supply buildup taking place while the price is so low, but surely every refiner is restocking the pipeline while demand is lower. We will have a small cushion.

In the meantime OPEC is tamping back supply by a couple of million barrels. I would like to believe that this could last but it will be gone with the snow. In the event, the price of oil will soon back to a $60 to $100 trading range, assuring everyone that it is just too expensive. If inventories do build properly, we may get a year’s pause in volatility in oil pricing, but this is only a respite.

The fundamental problem remains. We have no method of turning on an additional two million barrels of production per day. We could not do it properly when oil was $145 per barrel. All we could do was standby and watch the train wreck. The first casualty was the excessive credit balloon aided and abetted by the two year long commodity bull and the massive exposure to soft mortgage lending.

Oil drained the cash flow needed to support that balloon.

We also now know that the economy cannot be operated on expensive oil. This means that we are headed for demand regulation in order to preserve the economy. We have already discussed this extensively and have concluded that switching the trucking industry over to liquid natural gas (LNG) as proposed in California is the best available quick fix. Done in the USA, some millions of barrels of oil per day will be released back into the global market. Done globally, a real percentage of global demand will be released. I have not recently checked the numbers, but I believe that this will be close to 15 million barrels out of 87 million barrels.

Therefore, before we even think of the solar build out, we can ride through a major portion of the pending decline.

That still leaves us with the most economically wasteful use of oil. Personal transportation will have to be rationed. We cannot permit the demand for private convenience to price public good. Up to now we have had both. We are now entering a world were the use of available stocks will need to prioritize in terms of the common good. The best way to do this will be the ration card.

A ration card for gasoline will do more than any thing else we could ever do to drive the adoption of the electrical autocart. And yes folks, EEStor is looking more real every day.

An alternative to a ration card is a non commercial use tax. This is unfair to those who must have a car just to operate from their suburban home, or is it? We have a century of persuading folks to move out into distant acreages all supported indirectly by cheap gas. In reality, a ration card issued against known available supply is about as good as it will get. Some will benefit by having a surplus while those who must will buy those surpluses.

The good news is that we do not have a problem for 2009. In the meantime, maybe someone will hit the panic button and cause a crash THAI program in Alberta to give us that real two million barrel cushion and regulate the rapid adoption of LNG as in California.

Recall one single fact today. We are now consuming four barrels for every barrel we now find of conventional oil, excluding the Tarsands and their ilk. Those have only begun to yield oil in appreciable amounts. How much more stark can I make this?

Cosmic Rays Dismissed

This item goes a long way toward eliminating cosmic rays as a climate variable. It is sort of nice to know that we can eliminate at least one such variable. This is yet another case were improved resolution knocks out an attractive conjecture. Certainly the possibility of a correlation existed here and the lack of such is extremely convincing. We will not hear from this theory again.

MODIS data: cosmic rays do not explain global warming

December 24, 2008--The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), a spectral instrument built by Raytheon (El Segundo, CA) and sent into space on the Earth Observing System (EOS) Terra and Aqua satellites, has provided data for a new study that supports earlier findings by stating that changes in cosmic rays most likely do not contribute to climate change.

It has sometimes been claimed that changes in radiation from space--galactic cosmic rays--can be one of the causes of global warming. The new study, which investigates the effect of cosmic rays on clouds, concludes that the likelihood of this is very small.

The study, "Cosmic rays, cloud condensation nuclei and clouds--a reassessment using MODIS data," was recently published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. A group of researchers from the University of Oslo (Oslo, Norway), the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (Kjeller, Norway), the CICERO Center for Climate and Environmental Research (Oslo, Norway), and the University of Iceland (Reykjavik, Iceland) are behind the study.

The MODIS instrument has an off-axis telescope with a 17.78-cm-diameter aperture and provides image data in 36 spectral bands, ranging from 620 to 670 nm (band 1) to 14.085 to 14.385 microns (band 36). The instrument can reach a peak daytime data rate of 11 Mbit/s and draws an average of 150 W of electrical power.

Cosmic rays unlikely to affect warming

There are scientific uncertainties about cosmic rays and cloud formation. Some researchers have claimed that a reduction of cosmic rays during the last decades has contributed to the global temperature rise. The hypothesis is that fewer cosmic rays causes fewer cloud droplets and reduced droplet size, and that this again causes global warming, since reduced cloud droplets would reflect less energy from the sun back to space. However, the researchers who stick to this hypothesis find little support amongst colleagues.

"According to our research, it does not look like reduced cosmic rays leads to reduced cloud formation," says Jon Egill Kristjansson, a professor at the University of Oslo.

This result is in line with most other research in the field. As far as Kristjansson knows, no studies have proved a correlation between reduced cosmic rays and reduced cloud formation. Kristjansson also points out that most research shows no reduction in cosmic rays during the last decades, and that an astronomic explanation of today's global warming therefore seems very unlikely.

Data from solar outbreaks

Kristjansson and his colleagues have used observations from so-called Forbush decrease events: Sudden outbreaks of intense solar activity that lead to a strong reduction of cosmic rays, lasting for a couple of days. The researchers have identified 22 such events between 2000 and 2005.

Based on data from the spaceborne MODIS instrument, the researchers have investigated whether these events have affected cloud formation. While previous studies have mainly considered cloud cover, the high spatial and spectral resolution of the MODIS data also allows for a more thorough study of microphysical parameters such as cloud droplet size, cloud water content and cloud optical depth. No statistically significant correlations were found between any of the four cloud parameters and galactic cosmic rays.

"Reduced cosmic rays did not lead to reduced cloud formation, either during the outbreaks or during the days that followed. Indeed, following some of the events we could see a reduction, but following others there was an increase in cloud formation. We did not find any patterns in the way the clouds changed," says Kristjansson.

By focusing on pristine Southern Hemisphere ocean regions, the researchers examined areas where a cosmic-ray signal should be easier to detect than elsewhere.

Supports other recent work

Joanna Haigh from Imperial College London has also studied possible links between solar variability and modern-day climate change. "This is a careful piece of work by Jon Egill Kristjansson that appears to find no evidence for the reputed link between cosmic rays and clouds," she commented to BBC. "It's supporting other recent work that also found no relationship."

posted by John Wallace

Global Warming Rising

This is one global warming observation that we can all agree is beyond serious dispute. I almost saved it for April Fools day but think a chuckle is due as we put the memory of 2008 into the trash can.

Global warming on the rise

Posted: Dec 27, 2008 at 0052 hrs IST

Tasteless, colourless, odourless and painful, pure capsaicin is a curious substance. It does no lasting damage, but the body's natural response to even a modest dose (such as that found in a chili pepper) is self-defence: sweat pours, the pulse quickens, the tongue flinches, tears may roll. But then something else kicks in: pain relief. The bloodstream floods with endorphins-the closest thing to morphine that the body produces. The result is a high. And the more capsaicin you ingest, the bigger and better it gets.

Which is why the diet in the rich world is heating up. Hot chilies, once the preserve of aficionados with exotic tastes for cuisine from places such as India, Thailand or Mexico, are now a staple ingredient in everything from ready meals to cocktails.

One reason is that globalisation has raised the rich world's tolerance to capsaicin. What may seem unbearably hot to those reared on the bland diets of Europe or the Anglosphere half a century ago is just a pleasantly spicy dish to their children and grandchildren, whose student years were spent scoffing cheap curries or nacho chips with salsa. Recipes in the past used to call for a cautious pinch of cayenne pepper. For today's guzzlers, even standard-strength Tabasco sauce, the world's best-selling chili-based condiment, may be too mild. The Louisiana-based firm now produces an extra-hot version, based on habanero peppers, the fieriest of the commonly-consumed chilies.

But for the real "heat geeks", even that is too tame. Tesco, Britain's biggest supermarket chain, recently added a new pepper to its vegetable shelves: the Dorset naga. Inhaling its vapour makes your nose tingle. Touching it is painful; cooks are advised to wear gloves. It is the only food product that Tesco will not sell to children. By the standards of other chilies, it is astronomically hot. On the commonly used Scoville scale (based on dilution in sugar syrup to the point that the capsaicin becomes no longer noticeable to the taster) it rates 1.6m units, close to the 2m score of pepper spray used in riot control. The pepper that previously counted as the world's hottest, the Bhut Jolokia grown by the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University, scored just over 1m. That in turn displaced a chili grown by the Indian Defence Research Laboratory in Tezpur, which scored a mere 855,000. The hottest habanero chilies score a wimpy 577,000.

Floating Wind Turbines

This is a compelling bit of technology that if it can be made reliable, and I see little reason why not, will tap huge energy resources without creating inconvenient footprints. More interestingly, the economics should be superior to anything likely to ever be built on land. We may even be able to go the extra mile and tap current and tidal energy with the same hardware.

What makes it compelling is that it can be replicated a million times with no fuss whatsoever. It is very much like having dams built on demand and these will not be small machines.

The technology lends itself to continuous heavy manufacturing methods which can bring gross costs down substantially to make it very competitive with any one off engineered solution.

It will be interesting to watch this develop. It is like the early years in the wind turbine business were there were few outside believers. But once it is proven, the orders become unending.

I am sure New England and New York would love to have a few thousands of these in the Gulf Stream right now.


Floating Wind Turbines

According to a 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Energy, General Electric and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, offshore wind resources on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States exceed the current electricity generation of the entire U.S. power industry. NASA has also been investigating ocean wind strengths worldwide, using the QuikSCAT satellite.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080709210529.htm

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have been investigating the feasibility of "tension-leg" platforms for wind turbines, a technology that oil companies have been using for deep-water rigs. The structures would be assembled at a shipyard and placed on large floating cylinders that are ballasted with high-density concrete (to keep the structure from tipping over) and then tugged out to sea. Once in location, steel cables would be attached to the platform, anchoring it to the sea floor.

The MIT researchers claim that large turbines located far offshore could eventually generate cheaper power than both land based wind farms and near-offshore ones (even taking into account the increased cost of longer underground electricity transmission cables). Part of the cost advantage is the higher capacity factor achieved due to more consistent offshore winds - potentially averaging between 40 percent and 50 percent compared with 30 percent or less with land based turbines.

Some offshore wind farms could also have advantages in terms of proximity to large coastal cities compared to wind farms in remote areas, which require grid transmission upgrades to transport the power to places where it is consumed. Floating offshore wind farms also avoid bottlenecks in the supply of marine construction equipment such as pile drivers and cranes that may hamper rapid expansion of shallow offshore wind structures (however they may instead compete for some resources with offshore oil exploration and production, which could be problematical in the short to medium term).

A number of companies are active in the area of floating offshore wind technology - primarily Blue H Technologies, StatOil Hydro and SWAY.

Blue H Technologies

Blue H Technologies is a Dutch company that launched their first test platform at Tricase off Italy's southern coast late last year. The company has also announced plans to install another test turbine off Massachusetts.

The Blue H test platform in Italy is a tension-leg platform - a conventional offshore oil and gas platform design that floats below the surface, held in place by chains running to steel or concrete anchors on the seabed. The platform is located 10 km offshore and hosts an 80-kilowatt wind turbine which is mounted with sensors to record the wave and wind forces experienced by the equipment.

Blue H is now constructing a commercial wind farm for the Tricase site, which will have an installed capacity of 92 MW.

Blue H's design is unusual in that the turbine has a two-bladed rotor rather than the conventional three-blade design used elsewhere in. Technology Review has quoted Martin Jakubowski, Blue H cofounder and chief technology officer, as saying that "the noise and jarringly high rotation speeds that made two-bladers a loser on land are either irrelevant or a plus offshore" and that the fast rotation is "less susceptible to interference from the back-and-forth swing of the platform under wave action" and means less torque, resulting in a lighter structure (Blue H's 2.5-megawatt turbine will weigh 97 tons - 53 tons lighter than the lightest machine of the same power output on the market).

Tech Review also quotes Jakubowski as estimating that Blue H's wind farms will "deliver wind energy for seven to eight cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly matching the current cost of natural gas-fired generation and conventional onshore wind energy".

StatOil Hydro

Norwegian oil and gas producer StatoilHydro and Germany's Siemens (a major wind-turbine producer) are partnering in a project to build a commercial-scale floating wind farm about 10 kilometers offshore from Karmøy on Norway's southwestern tip.

StatoilHydro initially plans to operate a 2.3 MW wind turbine atop a conventional oil and gas platform, and is hoping for this to be operational in late 2009. Unlike the Blue H design, StatOilHydro is using traditional wind turbines.

The company believes floating wind farms are the way of the future, with a company spokesman saying that there are a declining number of sites available onshore and in shallow waters and citing regions without a shallow continental shelf like California, Japan and Norway where traditional offshore wind is not possible.

StatOilHydro says that deepwater wind power will be expensive in the initial stages but that the economics could eventually rival those of conventional wind power.

If deep offshore wind power in the North Sea proves to be successful it would become a major component on the planned European Supergrid, which backers hope will link up the region's power networks and allow a much higher proportion of renewable energy in future (possibly entirely fossil-free, as it will need to become eventually), including solar power from Spain and North Africa, wind from the North Sea and Ireland, biogas from central Europe and tidal power from the UK.

http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/07/02/floating-wind-turbines-in-the-north-sea/


SWAY

SWAY, based in Bergen, Norway, plans to field a prototype of its floating wind turbine in 2010. SWAY's platform is basically a spar buoy that can rise and fall gently with wave action, requiring less anchoring than the tension-leg platform. The buoy, mounted on a column nearly 200 meters tall, is held in place by a 2,400-ton gravel ballast. A three-bladed turbine is used, but, unlike conventional onshore turbines, it faces downwind rather upwind to better accommodate heeling of the tower, which may make it more effective in rougher waters than alternative designs.

The Simmons Plan

The cost estimated for Simmons' plan is $5 billion per gigawatt — more than double the amount that T. Boone Pickens’ now delayed wind farm in Texas is supposed to cost.

This seems high if the cost savings expected by the companies mentioned above eventuate, with the StatOilHydro experiment probably being the best guide, with the North Sea facing similar weather challenges to those experienced off New England.

Winter winds in the Gulf of Maine carry as much as eight times more energy as summer breezes, meaning maximum power is available during periods of greatest demand. About 80 percent of Maine residents use oil to heat their homes. The average family uses about 1,000 gallons, or 3,785 liters a year - when prices are around $4 a gallon ($1 a litre) this consumes about one-tenth of the average family's annual income, leading Simmons to declare "If we don't do this, we're [eventually] going to have to evacuate most of Maine".

Seen in that light, even an expensive offshore wind farm is better than the alternative.

As an added bonus, construction and maintenance of the structures will bring valuable job opportunities to a region hard hit by the decline of the fishing industry

Lost Millenium by Florin Diacu

I am working my way through a book written by Florin Diacu titled ‘The lost Millennium’. It tackles the fairly invisible debate over the accuracy of traditional chronology and the challenges to that orthodoxy. I had heard rumbles that our chronology may be a thousand years too long. I think that we all find that much too hard to swallow, simply because any point in history is described by a cloud of sources, objects, and dating tests that add up to a strong likelihood.

There are unsettling gaps, but we underestimate the difficulty in maintaining records and the existence of a regime interested in keeping records in the first place. We underestimate the loss of language. Can you imagine sitting in a Viking’s hall and taking notes in Latin, then getting a letter from a hundred miles away explaining local intelligence while your host has no ability to read any of it? How paranoid can you get?

Seen that way, any restoration had to take a lot of time.

The problem with gluing together chronology is the gaps, not just in time but in geography. The discovery of the importance of 1159 BCE as the effective end of the European Bronze Age stabilizes a whole group of regional chronologies by putting aside a lot of niggling concerns.

We can now say with assurance that Homer’s world was a couple of generations before 1159 BCE giving enough time for tale to be told and spread throughout the cultural area by sea and to reach Athens. It also puts the Argonauts in the Atlantic and opens the possibility of a completely new and more creditable interpretation. We now have access to the Amazon and the Mississippi as operational locales.

The problem is that we lack other such absolutes in the chronology game. We have far too many maybes.

We have had good global records for perhaps four hundred years. We have had good European and Chinese information for a thousand years. All this means is that records stop been lost outright. Further back, the inevitable gaps pop up and histories are simply missing.

For all of the Americas, we are now recovering fragments of Mayan history, and the same is true for the rest of the old world. It is also easy to get fooled by the depth of evidence of a regime or society. Look at the bible. This is the only extant historical record that survives from the Bronze Age. Other documents take the form of rituals, horoscopes and IOUs. We then must jump hundreds of years to the Greeks and their Roman successors. What happened to those other guys?

The archeological record is disclosing a global striving for civilization everywhere possible throughout the past 5,000 years. Everywhere a local chieftain built a palace and commanded his retainers. This made record keeping a true challenge and it obviously failed most of the time.

Diacu’s book surveys the research undertaken by a number of scholars including the original creators of our present chronology ` regime, and Newton in particular who all struggled with attempting to link written reports with astronomical probabilities. Everyone ever involved has been far too often inconclusive.

Most disconcerting are horoscopes depicting recent times yet associated historically a millennia earlier. If these types of time changes actually held up, history would be in for a massive rewrite.

What motivated the book were the writings of Fomenko and his associates who have argued that a thousand years are missing. Most of what Fomenko says is not too compelling and a lot is clearly wrong also. He does dig up a number of unresolved conflicts and also establishes the existence of a second conflict in historical methodology. That is that practitioners are discarding non conforming evidence. Over time, this bias will strip important evidence and patterns out of the data leaving only a self selected data set. This is not a problem in the physical sciences were replication soon catches up to you. This is a giant problem in history were the data cannot be easily be repeated.

The book is still an interesting read and introduces us to a lot of obscure history. However, I would advise reading the last chapter on consensus first to give you direction.

It is also clear that the issues raised are in the process of been resolved largely by modern carbon dating, that now can be extended to remnants of papyrus.

So we still can rely on our known chronology as long as we keep a weather eye out for unpleasant surprises and learn to ask why there is a lack of evidence when asking historic questions. I have asked this question many times while making a wide range of historic and archeological conjectures. I have then watched the evidence slowly emerge.

Bronze Age Collapse

I have posted extensively on the collapse caused by the 1159 BC Hekla blast and tsunami that destroyed the city of Atlantis at Gibraltar. This entry from Wikipedia gather together the known fallout from this single event as is known by today’s scholarship.

Of course, this scholarship continues to ignore the clear evidence of a huge copper trade between the Americas and the Old world. Bronze manufacturing required strong local sponsorship in the form of the palace economies described herein. These factories were the sub factories of a global copper trade that passed through the Atlanteans.

I suspect that the Atlantean fleet of perhaps a real ten thousand ships like they love to claim in Homer was making itself felt along the Egyptian coast in the years prior to the Hekla blast. They had unity and a system of confederate palace states. Recall that these were not particularly large cities so much a palace household and retainers. The surrounding population surely benefited and was certainly ruled by this caste of merchant princes who traded value for value. That all ended abruptly with the loss of the copper trade. These palaces were all then overthrown.

More critically, the surviving populations in Europe faced a twenty year collapse of their livelihoods and those that could took ship and joined in a sea borne migration into the Eastern Mediterranean. This was likely expressed as colonization including Gaza, Athens and Carthage, where already established factories were in position to absorb the refugees. We may never develop the details, but the advent of a surplus of desperate pirates surely explains the swift collapse of the many isolated trade palaces.

The other putative possibilities of causation are simply insufficient and were all easily handled in the course of business as usual. An influx of the desperate from the north was another matter and these guys were the original pro0viders of the best weapons. Is it any surprise that they were able to make the Egyptian state accommodate them? And recall that this was the single largest and strongest state in front of them.

Imagine a group of refugees landing in New Jersey and forcing the USA to make room for them? Pretty good trick even at a three thousand year remove.

This entry also confirms that iron was not seriously used until the loss of the copper trade. This clearly implies that the copper trade and its control was the road to wealth. Bronze made excellent weapons that were not likely surpassed by iron for centuries. They were simple to cast and work harden in the forge whereas iron needed to be laboriously converted into steel in very small batches.

In fact steel making did not change at all right into the industrial age which is why cannons were first made from bronze, then cast iron and then, very late in the day from steel. What this means is that had copper been available, the use of bronze would certainly have continued centuries more.

This item gives a really good snapshot of the time and place and is very consistent with the implied conjectures.

Bronze Age collapse --- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bronze Age collapse is the name given by those historians who see the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, as violent, sudden and culturally disruptive, expressed by the collapse of palace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia, which were replaced after a hiatus by the isolated village cultures of the Dark Ages period of history of the Ancient Near East. The Bronze Age collapse may be seen in the context of a technological history that saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of iron-working technology in the region, beginning with precocious iron-working in what is now Romania in the 13th and 12th centuries.[1] The cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria, and the Egyptian Empire in Syria and Canaan, bringing the scission of long-distance trade contacts and sudden eclipse of literacy, occurred between 1206 and 1150 BCE. In the first phase of this period, almost every city between Troy and Gaza was violently destroyed, and often left unoccupied thereafter (for example, Hattusas, Mycenae, Ugarit).

The gradual end of the Dark Age that ensued saw the rise of settled Neo-Hittite Aramaean kingdoms of the mid-10th century BCE, and the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Regional evidence

Anatolia

Main article: Downfall of the Hittite Empire
Every site important during the preceding Late Bronze Age shows a destruction layer, and it appears that here civilization did not recover to the same level as that of the Hittites for another thousand years. Hattusas, the Hittite capital, was burned and abandoned, and never reoccupied. Karaoglan was burned and the corpses left unburied. Troy was destroyed at least twice, before being abandoned until Roman times.

Cyprus

The catastrophe separates Late Cypriot II (LCII) from the LCIII period, with the sacking and burning of the sites of Enkomi, Kition, and Sinda, may have occurred twice, before being abandoned. A number of sites, though not destroyed, were also abandoned. Kokkinokremos was a short-lived settlement, where the presence of various caches concealed by smiths suggests that none ever returned to reclaim the treasures, suggesting they were killed or enslaved.

Syria

Syrian sites previously showed evidence of trade links with Egypt and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age. Evidence at Ugarit shows that the destruction there occurred after the reign of Merenptah, and even the fall of Chancellor Bay. Letters on clay tablets found baked in the conflagration of the destruction of the city speak of attack from the sea, and a letter from Alashiya (Cyprus) speaks of cities already being destroyed from attackers who came by sea. It also speaks of the Ugarit fleet being absent, patrolling the coast.

Levant

Egyptian evidence shows that from the reign of Horemheb, wandering Shasu were more problematic. Ramesses II campaigned against them, pursuing them as far as Moab, where he established a fortress, after the near collapse at the Battle of Kadesh. These Shasu were problematic, particularly when during the reign of Merneptah, they threatened the "Way of Horus" north from Gaza. Evidence shows that Deir Alla (Succoth) was destroyed after the reign of Queen Twosret. The destroyed site of Lachish was briefly reoccupied by squatters and an Egyptian garrison, during the reign of Ramesses III. All centres along the sea route, now being called Via Maris, from Gaza north were destroyed, and evidence shows Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Akko, and Jaffa were burned and not reoccupied for up to thirty years. Inland Hazor, Bethel, Beit Shemesh, Eglon, Debir, and other sites were destroyed. Refugees escaping the collapse of coastal centres may have fused with incoming nomadic and Anatolian elements to begin the growth of terraced hillside hamlets in the highlands region, that was associated with the later development of the state of Israel.

Greece

None of the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age survived, with destruction being heaviest at palaces and fortified sites. Up to 90% of small sites in the Peloponnese were abandoned, suggesting a major depopulation. The End Bronze Age collapse marked the start of what has been called the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted for more than 400 years. Other cities, like Athens, continued to be occupied, but with a more local sphere of influence, limited evidence of trade and an impoverished culture, from which it took centuries to recover.

Mesopotamia

The cities of Norsuntepe, Emar and Carchemish were destroyed, and the Assyrians narrowly escaped an invasion by Mushki tribes during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I. With the spread of Ahhlamu or Aramaeans, control of the Babylonian and Assyrian regions extended barely beyond the city limits. Babylon was sacked by the Elamites under Shutruk-Nahhunte, and lost control of the Diyala valley.

Egypt

Main article: Third Intermediate Period of Egypt

After apparently surviving for a while, the Egyptian Empire collapsed in the mid twelfth century BCE (during the reign of Ramesses VI). Previously the Merneptah Stele spoke of attacks from Lybians, with associated people of Ekwesh, Shekelesh, Lukka, Shardana and Tursha or Teresh, and a Canaanite revolt, in the cities of Ashkelon, Yenoam and the people of Israel. A second attack during the reign of Ramesses III involved Peleset, Tjeker, Shardana and Denyen.

Conclusion

Robert Drews describes the collapse as "the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire".[2] A number of people have spoken of the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a "lost golden age". Hesiod for example spoke of Ages of Gold, Silver and Bronze, separated from the modern harsh cruel world of the Age of Iron by the Age of Heroes.

Nature and causes of destruction

As part of the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age Dark Ages, it was a period associated with the collapse of central authorities, a general depopulation, particularly of highly urban areas, the loss of literacy in Anatolia and the Aegean, and its restriction elsewhere, the disappearance of established patterns of long-distance international trade, increasingly vicious intra-elite struggles for power, and reduced options for the elite if not for the general mass of population.

There are various theories put forward to explain the situation of collapse, many of them compatible with each other.

Earthquakes

Amos Nur shows how earthquakes tend to occur in "sequences" or "storms" where a major earthquake above 6.5 on the Richter magnitude scale can in later months or years set off second or subsequent earthquakes along the weakened fault line. He shows that when a map of earthquake occurrence is superimposed on a map of the sites destroyed in the Late Bronze Age, there is a very close correspondence. [3]

Migrations and raids

Further information: Sea peoples, Mushki, Aramaeans, and Ancient Iranian peoples

Ekrem Akurgal, Gustav Lehmann and Fritz Schachermeyer, following the views of Gaston Maspero have argued on the basis of the wide spread findings of Naue II-type swords coming from South Eastern Europe, and Egyptian records of "northerners from all the lands"[4]

The Ugarit correspondence draws attention to such groups as the mysterious Sea Peoples. Equally, translation of the preserved Linear B documents in the Aegean, just before the collapse, demonstrates a rise in piracy and slave raiding, particularly coming from Anatolia. Egyptian fortresses along the Libyan coast, constructed and maintained after the reign of Ramesses II were constructed to reduce raiding.

Ironworking

Leonard R. Palmer suggested that iron, whilst inferior to bronze weapons, was in more plentiful supply and so allowed larger armies of iron users to overwhelm the smaller armies of bronze-using maryannu chariotry.[5] This argument has been weakened of late with the finding that the shift to iron occurred after the collapse, not before. It now seems that the disruption of long distance trade, an aspect of "systems collapse", cut easy supplies of tin, making bronze impossible to make. Older implements were recycled and then iron substitutes were used.

On the other hand, technology cannot be so quickly dismissed as a factor. The invention of the technology of metallurgy is not generally regarded as a Paradigm Shift, in a class with the technologies of agriculture, city-building, industry and electronics. Yet metalworking had a profound impact on the course of mankind's development. Warfare on the scale with which we are familiar today was not possible when sharpened sticks and flint points and blades were the only weapons available. The first bronze swords and armor were surely regarded as "weapons of mass destruction" by the last inhabitants of stone age cities because of the carnage they made possible.

Still, the very nature of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, forces at least a grudging equilbrium on man's violent nature. Deposits of copper ore and tin ore almost never occur in the same region. In order to make bronze, two cities a fair distance apart must maintain peaceful relations and trade raw materials with each other.

Iron metallurgy destroyed this equilibrium. Only one ore is required to make iron artifacts, and deposits of it are abundant. The only trick to smelting iron is the creation of hitherto unimaginably high temperatures, because the melting point of iron is hundreds of degrees higher than that of copper and tin. But once that information became well known, there was nothing to stop even the most uncivilized of the remaining Neolithic tribes from arming their warriors, proclaiming themselves "kingdoms," and attacking the cities. Even worse, the cities were no longer dependent on each other for complementary ores, and had no more reason to maintain peaceful relations.

The Iron Age may not have been the cause of the collapse of civilization in its first place of origin, but it is difficult to dismiss iron as a possible reason for its slow recovery.

Drought

Barry Weiss [6], using the Palmer Drought Index for 35 Greek, Turkish, and Middle Eastern weather stations, showed that a drought of the kinds that persisted from January 1972 would have affected all of the sites associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse. Drought could have easily precipitated or hastened socio-economic problems and led to wars. More recently Brian Fagan, has shown how the diversion of mid-winter storms from the Atlantic were diverted to travel north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, bringing wetter conditions to Central Europe, but drought to the Eastern Mediterranean, was associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse[7]

General systems collapse

Main article: Societal collapse

A general systems collapse has been put forward as an explanation for the reversals in culture that occurred between the Urnfield culture of the 12-13th centuries BCE and the rise of the Celtic Hallstatt culture in the 9th and 10th centuries.[8] This theory may, however, simply beg the question as to whether this collapse was the cause of or the effect of the Bronze Age collapse being discussed. General Systems Collapse theories have been pioneered by Joseph Tainter[9] who shows how social declines in return to complexity leads often to collapse to simpler forms of society.

In the specific context of the Middle East a variety of factors - including population rise, soil degradation, drought, cast bronze weapon and iron production technologies - conceivably could have combined to push the relative price of weaponry compared to arable land to a level that ultimately proved to be beyond the control of traditional warrior aristocracies.

Changes in warfare

Robert Drews argues[10] that the appearance of massed infantry, using newly developed weapons and armor, such as cast rather than forged spearheads and long swords, a revolutionizing cut-and-thrust weapon,[11] and javelins, the appearance of bronze foundries itself suggesting "that mass production of bronze artifacts was suddenly important in the Aegean". Homer uses "spears" as a virtual synonym for "warrior" suggesting the continued importance of the spear in combat. Such new weaponry, furnished to a proto-hoplite model who were able to withstand attacks of massed chariotry, destabilized states that were based upon the use of chariots by the ruling class and precipitated an abrupt social collapse when raiders and/or infantry mercenaries were able to conquer, loot, and burn the cities.[12][1][2](-5-)

References

^ See A. Stoia and the other essays in M.L. Stig Sørensen and R. Thomas, eds., The Bronze Age—Iron Age Transition in Europe (Oxford) 1989, and T.H. Wertime and J.D. Muhly, The Coming of the Age of Iron (New Haven) 1980.
^ Drew 1993:1 quotes Fernand Braudel's assessment that the Eastern Mediterranean cultures returned almost to a starting-point ("plan zéro"), "L'Aube", in Braudel, F. (Ed) (1977), La Mediterranee: l'espace et l'histoire (Paris)
^ Nur, Amos and Cline, Eric; (2000) "Poseidon's Horses: Plate Tectonics and Earthquake Storms in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean", Journ. of Archael. Sc. No 27 pps.43-63 - http://srb.stanford.edu/nur/EndBronzeage.pdf
^ Robbins, Manuel (2001) Collapse of the Bronze Age: the story of Greece, Troy, Israel, Egypt and Peoples of the Sea" (Authors Choice Press)
^ Palmer, Leonard R (1962) Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Prehistory in the Light of the Linear B Tablets. (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1962)
^ Weiss, Barry: (1982) "The decline of Late Bronze Age civilization as a possible response to climatic change" in Climatic Change ISSN 0165-0009 (Paper) 1573-1480 (Online), Volume 4, Number 2, June 1982, pps 173 - 198
^ Fagan, Brian M. (2003), "The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Basic Books)
^ http://www.iol.ie/~edmo/linktoprehistory.html - a page about the history of Castlemagner, on the web page of the local historical society
^ Tainter, Joseph (1976)"The Collapse of Complex Societies" (Cambridge University Press)
^ Drews pp192ff.
^ The Naue Type II sword, introduced from the eastern Alps and Carpathians ca 1200, quickly established itself and became the only sword in use during the eleventh century; iron was substituted for bronze without essential redesign (Drews 1993:194.
^ Drews, R. (1993) The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. (Princeton 1993).
Oliver Dickinson, The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries BC Routledge (2007), ISBN 978-0415135900.

2008 Winter Sea Ice Data

This catches us up on the apparent total impact generated by the warming that took place in 2007. It was hardly obvious at the time, but all that warm water ripped into the ability of the sea ice to accrete. A lot less than normal was thus produced this past winter.

Those conditions do not exist this winter, and we are been subjected to a full press arctic chill. It is reasonable to anticipate a full season’s ice production this winter, if not even an increase. 2007 showed us just how quickly the sea ice can be reduced with the right conditions. Had the conditions of 2007 continued, then all the ice would have been easily removed by 2012, as then projected. Once again the weather has changed. Expect to complain about cold winters for a decade at least.

Of course diehards are already claiming that global warming is now preventing the next ice age.

Right now, the right question should be how much further this sudden cooling downswing has to go before it plateaus. Notice I did not say rebound. Rising seems to take a very long time and likely averages less than a tenth of a degree per year, and there is no assurance that it will climb as high as this time.

It would be nice to link this process directly to solar radiation with a high degree of real certainty. That way it would become possible to model other effects properly including CO2. This time around, it looks like the CO2 enthusiasts jumped on the wrong trend and are now having it thrown back in their faces.

http://www.earthportal.org/news/?p=2031

Arctic Sea Ice Is Suddenly Getting Thinner As Well As Receding

Posted on December 19th, 2008

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2008) — Last winter, the thickness of sea ice in large parts of the Arctic fell by nearly half a metre (19 per cent) compared with the average thickness of the previous five winters. This followed the dramatic 2007 summer low when Arctic ice extent dropped to its lowest level since records began.

Up until last winter, the thickness of Arctic sea ice showed a slow downward trend during the previous five winters, but after the summer 2007 record low extent, the thickness of the ice also nose-dived. What is concerning is that sea ice is not just receding but it is also thinning.

Some scientists blamed the record summer 2007 ice extent low on unusually warm weather conditions over the Arctic, but this summer, sea ice extent reached the second lowest level since records began, even though the Arctic had a relatively cool summer. Dr Katharine Giles, who led the study and is based at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London – part of the National Centre for Earth Observation, says: “This summer’s low ice extent doesn’t seem to have been driven by warm weather, so the question is, was last winter’s thinning behind it?”

The team of researchers, including Dr Seymour Laxon and Andy Ridout, used satellites to measure sea ice thickness over the Arctic from 2002 to 2008. Winter sea ice in the Arctic is around two and half metres thick on average. Ice thickness can be calculated from the time it takes a radar pulse to travel from a satellite to the surface of the ice and back again.

The research - reported in Geophysical Research Letters - showed that last winter the average thickness of sea ice over the whole Arctic fell by 26cm (10 per cent) compared with the average thickness of the previous five winters, but sea ice in the western Arctic lost around 49cm of thickness. This region of the Arctic saw the North-West passage become ice free and open to shipping for the first time in 30 years during the summer of 2007.

The team is the first to measure ice thickness throughout the Arctic winter, from October to March, over more than half of the Arctic, using the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite. Before this, Christian Haas of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, had discovered thinner ice in a small region around the North Pole. Whilst the overall loss of older, thicker ice led researchers to speculate that Arctic sea ice had probably thinned, this is the first time scientists have been able to say for definite that the ice thinning was widespread and occurred in areas of both young and old ice.

“The extent of sea ice in the Arctic is down to a number of factors, including warm weather melting it as well as currents and the wind blowing it around, so it’s important to know how ice thickness is changing as well as the extent of the ice,” added Giles.

Second Mortgage Default Wave

60 minutes on Sunday a couple of weeks back shared with us the problem with the second wave of mortgage defaults been precipitated by mortgages with built in resets. It is ugly and the scale of the problem is easily as large as the subprime portfolio we have just digested. My own thoughts on this matter are that this portfolio will turn out to be a lot more financeable than anyone expects.

The reason for this is that the interest rates have sunk so low that the monthly payment should still be affordable to most borrowers. Of course, outright speculators who have no hope of a profit remaining and are certainly underwater will be walking. That is why some high rise condo buildings are empty.

The question now is how do we ensure that this possibility is fully exploited? A federal guarantee is one option for say ninety percent of the face of the mortgage. All this ensures that a large percentage of current homeowners remain homeowners and prevents this fresh inventory from entering the market.

That leaves the nasty problem of what to do with the inventory now underwater. We are still left with the option of going to a mark to market program that accepts a prices point anniversary date and refinances fifty percent of the property at going rates while exchanging the balance of the old mortgage for a fifty percent equity stake in the property.

This method still has the potential of resolving all the bad paper and can be also used as a tool to resell the entire property inventory that the banks are now stuck with. More critically it places a floor on the housing market and eliminates the entire overhang as quickly as possible. Otherwise this overhang will be squeezing the market for several years and I am been optimistic.

The necessary money is already largely in place and certainly more can be added. I would also expect that this drastic move would be swiftly rewarded by rising housing prices and a swift recovery of homeowner equity resulting in profitable buyouts of the remaining bank owned equity. In fact, I would expect that this procedure would become standard in the industry as a preferred alternative to foreclosure.

The problem with all this is that it needs to be mandated through legislation and carefully overseen. It cannot happen otherwise because of various conflicting rules.

The current scenario is unfolding in slow motion, one foreclosure at a time. This means that the end buyers are monitoring capital deterioration that they now expect to continue for at least two years. By going to a mark to market strategy, this is ended and the capital shortfall is recognized and made up. The institution is making money and rebuilding capital the next day. I think this is very doable once the complexities are fully understood and clarified.

Monetization of Global Pollution

For the past forty plus years, there has been a concerted effort to resolve the pollution problems of industry and agriculture. One underlying problem has emerged over and over again. It is that the actual decisions are been made by people who are simply unqualified to make those decisions, or worse, are selling an engineered solution whose merit is based primarily on its ownership.

Over and over again, better ways exist but are not deployed because those with their hand on the till cannot profit. Twenty years ago, I was led into surveying the nascent soil remediation business and came away convinced that the whole process was corrupted. It may be better now.

If there is one economic sector that demands a global regulatory protocol, it is the licensing of waste disposal. We already hear about Cap and Trade for CO2. This needs to be extended to every other known pollutant.

This does not mean that just because every metal producer has to pay money to dispose of SOx and NOx that they will all get together to do anything about it. What it does do is define the expense for an entrepreneurial solution while regulatory oversight becomes almost unnecessary except to audit and collect the charge.

Why it has not happened is that waste has been thrown into a global commons. As soon as you have a real problem you shop for a compliant jurisdiction. This facility has had the unwanted effect of shipping dangerous polluters into strange places.

Yet it is obvious that a global disposal charge would immediately focus everyone’s attention on amelioration strategies.

And it might be easier to get a consensus on this before we can get it of CO2. With most pollutants, most countries have little to lose and once everyone understands that the new regime is universal, it is easier to sell politically.
I would like to see the UN reconstitute itself to properly deal with this particular agenda. There exists a global consensus and it simply needs to be mobilized. The economic tools need to be created and managed openly to avoid fraud. And it fraud occurs it is still small enough to not be overly damaging.

It would gain the institution credit that is impossible to get in military adventures.

Oil Reality Check by Nelder

Chris Nelder once again serves up a reality check on the global oil supply situation. It continues to be awful. That is because we have not added a major new resource for decades and the last and best is passing through peak onto the way to decline.

The only offset is the Alberta Tarsand arriving with pending THAI production and it is certainly never going to be cheap oil. At least that supply can realistically displace a third of global demand in a declining environment.

As I have already posted, I expect the global oil industry to downsize from the current 85,000,000 barrels per day to 50,000,000 barrels per day over the next few decades with a third coming from Alberta, a third from the Middle East and a third from everyone else. It will simply become too valuable to simply burn as fuel in all but the most critical applications. At that rate of consumption, costly oil will be readily available for many millennia.

This blog has investigated many alternative options that can successfully displace this missing oil, so there is no need to rehash them here.

It is worth explaining why the oil industry is shrinking. We currently produce around 85.000.000 barrels per day. All the sources are in decline or about to enter decline. Been incredibly generous, let us pretend that we will only need 2,000,000 barrels per day of new production turned on each year. That way we can replace our current production in forty years. Makes sense?

That means that we need to find a resource able to support this level of production for at least twenty years every year. That translates into a resource of 20X365X2.0Mil. = 14.6 billion barrels of oil in the ground. We have to find one each and every year just to stand still. We have not found such resources for decades. Yet we need to find one in 2009 and every year thereafter.

The bottom line is absolutely clear today. Conventional oil is not able to come up to speed and this was clear to the industry for decades because they have been looking wherever they have been allowed to look. A seven billion barrel field in deep water off the coast of Brazil is a very poor reward.

In light of this developing scenario, one thing becomes clear. Economic expansion based on oil energy is now impossible and must henceforth rely on alternative energy and that really means solar.

In the short term, the global financial system will swing back into operation after the current time out has ended and most everyone has figured out that they are still alive. The first price to respond will be that of oil because of its still central role in the global economy. And another year of peak oil has gone by. It is now like waiting for a heart patient to have a heart attack. As time progresses, it takes a smaller and smaller clog to hurt us.


Oil Prices are Wrong--Very Wrong

By Chris Nelder Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

Everybody seems to have the same question for me lately: What's the deal with gasoline prices?

How could it go from $2 a gallon to over $4 and then back to $1.66 in a single year? Was it speculators?

The evil machinations of OPEC? Badly-timed fills and draws of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)?

A financial calamity engineered by the masterminds of a shadowy wealth conspiracy?

It's never an easy question to answer, but I can easily say "none of the above."

The price of oil and gasoline is set daily and globally by a complex interaction of many factors, including the relative valuations of currency, speculation in oil futures, the fact that oil is "priced at the margins," delayed supply and demand feedback to the market, economic growth rates, money flows of hedge funds and big institutional investors, geological factors, geopolitics, and many more.

Oil shot to $147 this year because of a particular highly-leveraged alchemy of those factors, and it fell as the leverage unwound. It's down now because the world is heading into a major recession and traders are, as usual, overdoing their bearish reaction.

OPEC's responses this year have been mostly late to the game, so they were regularly ignored by the market. Last week's production cuts by the cartel, and the subsequent sell-off in oil, was a fine example of this.

Filling the SPR is too negligible to move the markets either. In May, the debate over filling the SPR raged on with hardly anyone seeming to realize that its 68,000 barrels per day of demand is a mere blip against the US consumption of 21 million barrels per day. Traders ignored it.

Much more to the point is an analysis of over 100 studies on gasoline price elasticity by the trade magazine Energy Journal, which found when gas prices increase 10%, they cut demand by 2.6%. When prices fall, consumption picks back up.

Anatomy of a Frenzy

Oil and other commodities shot up in the first part of the year as investors sought a safe haven against the financial calamity stemming from the subprime meltdown and levered up their bets with wild abandon.

That trend reversed course in June as the world's central banks began cutting interest rates and the US flooded the markets with dollars. The global deleveraging that ensued caused a rout in the commodity markets, and absolutely everything was sold indiscriminately as money managers scrambled to meet redemption calls and raise cash.

The progressively worsening news about the health of the global economy has only fed the selling frenzy, pushing down oil prices further still. It's now more profitable to store oil than to sell it immediately, and OPEC has made yet another belated and ineffectual move to curb a supply glut.

The Asian tigers that were widely expected to support demand, even as OECD demand fell, have reported extremely bearish numbers in the last week as their economic growth stalls.

Oil consumption is off 3.2% from a year ago in China, the world's second-largest consumer of oil, and its crude imports are now at their lowest levels this year.

Japan's oil exports fell to record lows in the sharpest monthly decline since such records have been kept;

meanwhile, imports to the world's third-largest oil consumer are down 17% year over year. South Korea's oil imports are also down 6.5% year over year.

Oil consumption by the world's top oil consumer, the US, has led the global decline with an expected 1.2 million barrels per day decline from past levels through 2009, according to the latest EIA report.

And voila: after thirteen straight weeks of price declines, gasoline is back to $1.66 a gallon.

Some have even suggested that oil in the $40s, and the current glut of oil supply, is proof that fears about peak oil supply were wrong.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

A False Sense of Complacency

A sub-$40 fill-up only lulls us into a false sense of complacency. As I have written repeatedly in recent weeks, we are setting ourselves up for a serious supply problem in the future with oil prices now below their replacement costs.

The facts are sobering:

· Current petroleum stocks in the US are still within the average range for this time of year, according to EIA. They're now about 8% higher than this time last year, but that's really nothing to write home about, and it's not much of a "glut."

· In a recent interview with Jim Puplava, energy analyst Robert Hirsch commented that a 1 million barrels per day decline in world demand would only move back the global peak of oil production by one month. By that metric, the allegedly huge cutback in oil consumption has bought the world about one month more before we peak—whoop-de-do.

· Oil production in Canada, the US's top source of crude imports, is faltering as prices are now too low to justify new projects that tap its large-but-costly and difficult reserves in tar sands and heavy oil.

· Our number-three source of imports, Mexico, is in serious trouble. Crude output from our southern neighbor has fallen 7% over last year, and exports are falling much faster, at a 20% decline, according to Pemex. (As I wrote back in June, exports fall faster than overall production. See "The Impending Oil Export Crisis.") Production from its largest field, Cantarell, one of the four "supergiant" oil fields in the world, is crashing at the rate of 33% per year. At the current rate, Mexico's oil exports will cease altogether in just seven years.

· Experts at the ASPO and elsewhere believe that, within the next two years, world oil production will go into permanent decline, with depletion removing 2.5 million barrels per day from the world market— that's roughly equivalent to the total oil imports of Germany. There are no oil projects that can overcome a decline rate like that. And yet, no major economy is even preparing for this inevitability.

· Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi has warned that the world needs $75 oil to ensure future supply, and that current prices "are wreaking havoc on the industry and threatening current and planned investments."

· With gasoline now well below $2 a gallon, hybrids and other higher-efficiency cars are staying on the dealer lots. According to an analyst at Edmunds.com, a new hybrid would pay for itself in gasoline savings in two or three years with gasoline at $4 a gallon; but, below $2 a gallon, it's more like seven to eight years. Less than a year ago, you had to get on a waiting list and pay a premium over sticker to buy a new Prius. Now dealers have lots full of them, and Toyota has experienced such a sharp decline in sales that it posted its first operating loss in 70 years. Hopes that we will quickly replace a large percentage of our rolling stock with higher efficiency vehicles are now on hold, along with the hopes for a massive campaign of drilling shale formations and deepwater reservoirs.

· A steep contango condition in oil futures is still in place, reflecting the market's near-term oversupply and long-term uncertainty.

Given the evidence, the price of oil is wrong. Very wrong. Crude for under $65 a barrel is a bargain, and crude in the low $40s is a steal. I would not be at all surprised to see a sudden and violent move back up for oil prices within the next year, once the current extreme market conditions revert to the mean.

I am still long oil (United States Oil Fund LP ETF, NYSE:USO) and will add to my position if it goes lower. My expectation is to hold it for a year, in case it further overshoots to the downside before recovering.
I'm also on the hunt for top-notch oil companies with low production costs, sizable reserves, and balance sheets healthy enough to let them acquire smaller competitors at basement prices.
I know it's been a tough year for most investors; but, we're nearly done with this turkey, and I'm setting my sights on profits for 2009. The buying opportunity of a lifetime is upon us. All we have to do now is wait for the right moment to pull the trigger.