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Archive for September, 2010
Peak Oil temes – 2002 Interview with British petroleum geologist Colin Campbell – A witful and well sensed foretelling of our 2010 situation
Sep 20th
Although the history of crude oil starts way back in time, the 1815 contamination with petroleum of the salt wells located near the city of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) marks the frail starting point in modern oil production that would precede the 1948 drilling of the first modern oil well on the Aspheron Peninsula located north-east of Baku, Azerbaidjan; this achievement was proudly accomplished by the Russian engineer F.N. Semyenov.
From the dawn of time, some 6 million of years ago, when our most recent common ancestor with the chimpanzee was patrolling the plains of east Africa, ’till 1815, the number of people inhabiting the planet was swiveling around 1 billion. In just 200 years from that time the population will blithely exceed 7 billion people. Albeit coal would have bootstrapped the industrialization of modern societies, thanks to oil these 7 billion humans will have had the opportunity at decent food, warm and towering shelters, worldwide transportation, and high tech marvels. This unimaginable amount of energy, trapped hundreds of feet underground some tens of millions of years ago, are the product of organic materials that stand in need of millions of years of ongoing chemical reactions in order to yield their prowess. Thousands of ancient species of tiny animals and plants gave their gigantesque organic energy to 7 billion people that, some say, are currently living the moments when they have already consumed half of its magic on their vertiginously staggering societal development. Peak Oil is when half the blood of planet Earth is gone forever.
Whether Peak Oil is here or not is highly debatable and controversial. Some say it already happened in 2005 or 2010, some say it will happen in 2020, and some say it’s way ahead in 2030 or later. The battle of memes between pessimists like the sorely missed Matt Simmons, or the doomer Michael Ruppert, and the highly optimistic mysterious numbers put on the table by the OPEC oil cartel, or the OECD governments’ economic trade organization, is more ebullient than ever.
Although mainstream media has already started giving serious attention to this issue, and even if OECD’s International Energy Agency (IEA) started giving hints on the mouldered cake of deficit about to be yielded by the overstressed ecological oven due to our overly unsatisfied thirst of cheap oil and unending growth, the reality is that whether or not we reached Peak Oil isn’t of much importance as is the question of whether the current global demand for oil has exceeded the global oil production or not. When that happens, we’re all going to fell the shell shock brought about by this unsatisfied demand. Conflicting data exists on this issue, and due to its extremely unreliable nature its hard to put the stamp of conviction on its date of occurrence. Demand may have already surpassed production as early as 2006, or it may hit us as early as the beginning of 2011, or maybe around 2017.
The 10th of September 2010 IEA Report projects the 2010 global oil demand at 86.6 mb/d, and at 87.9 mb/d in 2011 (an all time high); also, global oil supply fell 250 kb/d to 86.8 mb/d in August 2010, as the non-OPEC output dipped to 52.4 mb/d on seasonal maintenance in Russia, UK, and Canada … Bits of data from here and there which show us that demand gets greater and greater even though we peaked global oil discoveries in the ’60s. One important clue that we will take notice of, when this disparage of demand/production and peak oil will occur, is the so called bumpy plateau, that is, the relatively stable region of ups and downs (characterized by volatility in oil prices, maybe recessions) on the global graph of oil production from which there is only one direction after this state of events dries its batteries: Downwards. A hell of as lot of these graphs are to be found on the internet. Some of them point to 2005/2006 as the starting point of the plateau, others, more optimistic, predict this date a couple of years later.
Letting aside the biased evidence sprouted from left and right by individuals and organizations that have their own personal interests or subjective views, one can get a hint about the peak oil situation by looking at what the major oil companies are doing. We have very scarce evidence on new major oil refineries that are being designed or currently under development. Currently, major oil corporations aim at bolstering their offshore oil drilling, and already began to outsource significant amounts of workforce thus not committing to offer long term employment. All these facts point to a contracting oil industry making itself prepared for its last barrels of cheap oil.
What are the most likely countries to benefit from this crisis? As of 2009 Russia and Iran are considered the top holders of natural gas resources in the world with more than 70 trillion cubic meters of reserves (it’s funny how “nuclear” is Iran getting lately). The Middle East continues to be the world’s major oil provider, and it’s very funny how the planet’s watchdog, the U.S.A, decided to give the gift of “democracy” to Iraq right about when cheap oil is getting scarce. Canada’s tar sands reserves are plentiful, but there’s no debate over the net energy loss due to the great quantities of natural gas that are required to produce it, and the environmental difficulties that may lay ahead due to the great quantities of water needed for the tar sand oil production.
A myriad of people started to expose their concerns about Peak Oil and British petroleum geologist Colin Cambell is one of the most well respected oil industry professionals that is worth listening to; his well calculated, well sensed, skeptical view on the issue, you can get grips with by following a 2002 video interview made available on Youtube by the Post Carbon Institute’s EnergyBulletin.net (formerly GlobalPublicMedia.com).
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Hardcore exemplification of the Selfish Gene Theory in the world of finance, and why does altruism work only on similar layers of power
Sep 19th
“Half of the world’s wealth is owned by two percent of the population“, and the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and wider. What more evidence do you want in order for you to accept the inherently selfish nature of every human being? We’re not going to abide by the conspiracy theorists’ thesis which states that these wealthy men are evil conspirators set up to destroy the world, are we? So, how are we going to explain this architecture in the distribution of wealth and power that we see nowdays?
Richard Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene” taught us a great lesson: Every organism on this planet should and will act only in the interest of its selfish replicators, its genes. Although in the ending of the book Dawkins tries to redeem the faux pas with his chapter on memes, its overall message is blunt and clear: Cooperation between individuals is a characteristic that evolves only if the net payoff of that social contract is greater that the net loss of non-cooperation (defection). That means that you spread more of your selfish genes mostly when you cooperate with and help your close kin, and a little bit when you develop social bonds with individuals that you don’t relate with that much but that may provide you access to resources in the exchange of you providing them also at a later time. Resources may represent food, water, land, females, etc. These are the true motives of cooperation.
With the evolution of complex social systems, specialized social organizations started developing. Tribes, countries, governments, unions, churches, political parties, free trade organizations, and of course corporations. You don’t think all of these societal or economic megaliths work together for the benefit of the whole planet do you? Don’t be fooled by the woulda-coulda-shouldas that took too naive sociology classes in their college. These social constructs are interconnected in a complex network in which the cooperation of two entities means the peril and suffering of another. Energy just flows. It’s neither created, nor destroyed. Why shouldn’t giant corporations make massive profits for themselves and their employees (just like the leader of a tribe would profit from other tribes in order to help his closer kin) at the expense of individuals that are not part of that corporation (i.e. not part of the tribe)? The smart thing each and every corporation should do is to try, at first, to annihilate all the competition located on the same societal strata (other corporations), and if that fails try to cooperate with it. And this exactly what you see: Corporations merging with each other while others file bankruptcy, bank cartels that indebt whole nations, teams of nations going to war with each other for resources. Isn’t the picture already clear enough?
The main point i’m trying to make is that there is no inherently biological good for the species, good for the ecosystem mechanism programmed into our behavior. Group Selection Theory, as stated in The Selfish Gene, is a chimera. Countries, Corporations, Bankers, through the individuals within, will fight or cooperate with each other in order to suck the juice out of as much of the other entities as they can. Arms races develop. Groups of individuals get better and better at defending themselves or profiting from other groups, while the weak ones die along with their constitutive elements, the people.
Evidence for what i’m saying? How can you explain that while the world’s resources are getting depleted at a rate unimaginable in the past, the demand keeps blithely increasing? Growth, growth, growth is on every politician’s lips. Yeah, he has no problem to fool its sheep in order to get an easy vote. And why should he care? By the time the whole world is going to suffer from famine, he’s already dead, he’s already had the party of his life. Peak oil is waiting around the corner. Yet, you don’t see and politician, corporation, or country acknowledge that. Why is that? Again, each entity tries to maximize it’s profits in the short term, never bothering with the energy bereft planet that our children, their children, will inherit in the near future.
Is there any chance any of this will change? Maybe. But, until then let us just face reality. You just watch Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) by James Scurlock, the chronicles of abusive practices in the credit card industry, and you tell me how is this planet going to solve its energy issue when it couldn’t even stop the selfish bank cartels indebt sovereign countries by printing money out of nothing, and lending people’s money to themselves? You may have the answer, i don’t!
Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) is an independent feature-length documentary film which exposes abusive, selfish practices in the credit card industry. Written and directed by James Scurlock, the film uses interviews with creditors, debtors, academics, and others to illustrate its blunt story. The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, USA, in 2006 where it claimed the Special Jury Prize. It went on to several film fests including Bergen, Maui, Seattle, Full Frame Documentary, New Zealand, Milwaukee International, Woodstock, Leeds International, Oxford and IDFA film festivals.
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Terrorism Deception – Why religion’s blinding faithfulness is not the only to be blamed for terrorism’s atrocities
Sep 3rd
Are terrorists just straight out nuts, religious fanatics with only one goal in mind: to destroy every other religion? Or, are they some particular type of people who just so happened to be infected with the wrong kind of meme: RELIGION?
Liberty is the prevention of control by others. Living in a time when Big Brother starts to invade our lives, and some of conspiracy theorists’ “absurd” tales come to be true, addressing the above problem might help us cut its root not doctor its effects. Prevention is better than cure; prevention of terrorism is better than letting Big Brother handle the issue afterwards. We need to know what makes a human being become a terrorist in order to not lose our freedoms.
In a 2009 Paper, and in a 2010 addendum to that paper, Ginges, Hansen, and Norenzayan compared two hypothesis: the religious-belief hypothesis and the coalitional-commitment hypothesis in order to find out the exact reasons that push suicide terrorists to such extreme measures. The religious-belief hypothesis, if we were to quote their paper exactly, is somehow caused by “…devotion to religious belief which encourages suicide attacks, because, for example, religious belief might lead to hatred of non-believers…”; so, simple and outright hatred of non-believers caused by the devotion to religious belief as a whole should be the main artificer (no joke here), the start of the causal chain which leads to suicide terrorism.
On the other hand, if we consider the other hypothesis, the coalitional-commitment hypothesis, which quoted again states that “…frequent attendance in collective religious ritual might facilitate positive attitude towards parochial altruism in general and, in relevant contexts, suicide attacks in particular.“, we find out that suicide terrorism may be simply caused by sheer devotion to the group in which frequent attendance to collective religious rituals take place quite often so that potential suicide terrorists get sucked into what is called “parochial altruism”, that is, an extreme case of altruism where the perpetrator kills himself in order to kill as many individuals of the rival group as he can.
By measuring the frequency of prayer in order to get a hint about the religious devotion of several religious groups, and the frequency of attendance at the synagogue, mosque, and church, the researchers reached a dubious conclusion. No link was found between frequency of prayer and parochial altruism, and more to this, no link was found between frequency of prayer and suicide terrorism. Instead, strong causal relations between frequency of attendance at the synagogue and parochial altruism/suicide terrorism sprouted from their study. To make this more clear, the researchers found no evidence to prove that the more you prayed, that is, the more you were devoted to the religious belief system, the more likely it was you would commit suicide terrorism; nor did it prove that increased prayer frequency breed more cohesion between you and the religious group as a whole so as to make you kill other individuals belonging to rival religious groups. Instead, the sheer frequent attendance to collective religious rituals which increases within-group cooperation, no matter how devoted you were to that religion’s beliefs, fostered and boosted your chances to become a suicide terrorist, and also the chances that you would support suicide terrorism due to increased outer-group hostility.
Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan concluded:
Since frequency of attendance at sites of collective religious ritual always strongly predicted support for suicide attacks but frequency of prayer never did, we concluded that our results strongly supported the coalitional commitment hypothesis, but failed to support the religious belief hypothesis. We also argued that this more broadly implies that any relationship between religion and suicide attacks may be independent of devotion to specific religious creeds and instead is a function of the way religions help to bind people together into communities of parochial altruists.
In the 2010 Understanding Suicide Terrorism: Premature Dismissal of the Religious-Belief Hypothesis paper, Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford thwarted the conclusions of above study by stating that the method used in order to prove that the religion-belief hypothesis is false is in fact flawed, so further studies are needed in order to clarify the issues. Scientists concluded that the premature dismissal of the religious belief hypothesis by only measuring religious devotion in general without actually disproving certain specific religious beliefs makes the inference of the Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan study come too bright and early.
Now, first of all, taking as input only religious motives when one analyzes the complex algorithm of global terrorism has pretty low chances of yielding a practical and working model for this phenomenon. We can easily find examples of extreme terrorism and suicide terrorism which an attentive non-shallow analysis will show us they have no connection with religion at all. The fact of the matter is that a high number of terrorist acts all around the world are caused by the revenge for the abusive actions inflicted by some groups onto others; the Chechen war and Chechen terrorist acts are examples of such events that easily come to anyone’s mind, even though some naive analysts might catalogue them as wars started because of religious motives. Further studies will have to address the above in conjunction with the motives presented by the Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford rebutal study.
And now a little critique only on the Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan study. Researchers concluded that suicide terrorism may be simply caused by sheer devotion to the group in which frequent attendance to collective religious rituals take place quite often so the suicide terrorist gets sucked into what is called “parochial altruism”. I can’t find this argument as the only plausible reason for suicide terrorism because i can easily give you examples of groups in which frequent attendance to collective rituals also take place and there is no suicide terrorism taking place there, even though we may find evidence for parochial altruism. One example is UK’s soccer hooligans. They attend weekly in collective soccer rituals and they don’t commit suicide, but, and here is the glint, they do engage in public fights quite often thus proving that parochial altruism is caused by the group’s collective rituals. I think this argument can be further developed to support Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford in their attempt to show that the specificity of the religious beliefs must also be of major importance if we are to solve this mystery.
