Oil Production: We’re #1! We’re #1! USA USA!
When I was growing up, we had it constantly drilled into our heads how awful the 1970s had been because the U.S. was “dependent on foreign oil.” That was the (ostensible) reason for the energy conservation campaigns and government policies to encourage the switch to non-fossil fuels. I remember seeing statistics talking about how the world and/or U.S. (depending on the stat) only had “x years of oil left” at current rates of consumption.
I walk through the economics of this faulty mindset in the beginning of this speech on energy issues at the recent Mises University conference. But also check out this Bloomberg article from last month:
The U.S. will remain the world’s biggest oil producer this year after overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia as extraction of energy from shale rock spurs the nation’s economic recovery, Bank of America Corp. said.
U.S. production of crude oil, along with liquids separated from natural gas, surpassed all other countries this year with daily output exceeding 11 million barrels in the first quarter, the bank said in a report today. The country became the world’s largest natural gas producer in 2010. The International Energy Agency said in June that the U.S. was the biggest producer of oil and natural gas liquids.
…
Oil extraction is soaring at shale formations in Texas and North Dakota as companies split rocks using high-pressure liquid, a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The surge in supply combined with restrictions on exporting crude is curbing the price of West Texas Intermediate, America’s oil benchmark…U.S. oil output will surge to 13.1 million barrels a day in 2019 and plateau thereafter, according to the IEA, a Paris-based adviser to 29 nations. The country will lose its top-producer ranking at the start of the 2030s, the agency said in its World Energy Outlook in November.
Here is EIA data on historical U.S. crude output, but be careful this just focuses on “crude” and not the broader category including all liquids:
Back in 1984, if someone had said that in 30 years the U.S. would be the world’s leader in crude production, why that would have been as ridiculous as claiming that the New York Times would talk about the president’s “secret kill list” without causing a revolution.
More on “Risky Business”
Part 2 at IER of my commentary on “Risky Business,” the climate change analysis co-chaired by Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson, and Thomas Steyer. An excerpt:
Thus we see the fundamental flip-flop: Rubin’s long quotation from page 44 can only make sense if the Report is urging a globally-coordinated government crackdown on carbon emissions. Yet on the very next page, Snowe claims that “we” (which presumably means the Americans reading the report, which focuses on regional U.S. impacts) have the power to avert this catastrophe.
These two claims do not fit together. Even if policymakers took Rubin’s advice to “act now” and immediately halted all further U.S. carbon dioxide emissions forever, this draconian move would only make global temperaturesone-tenth of a degree Celsius cooler in the year 2100 than they would otherwise be, if the U.S. government took no action.
Incidentally, here is the video compilation I made the graphics guy at IER assemble, in response to Paulson saying he knows about risk management and that’s why we should take him seriously as he lectures us on climate change:
The Importance of Willpower and Wisdom
My son and I were discussing spiritual matters and came up with these observations, which may interest some of you:
==> If you give your soul to the Lord, you may suffer greatly in this life (look what happened to Jesus, who obeyed His Father perfectly), but you will receive eternal bliss.
==> If you give your soul to the Devil, you may bask luxuriantly in this life (we can’t know, but probably some members of the Bilderberg Group come to mind), but you will receive eternal torment.
As I told my son: “Not everyone believes in this stuff, but suppose for the moment that that really is the tradeoff: What’s the wise choice?”
Now, for those of you who don’t “believe in this stuff,” notice that it still serves a useful metaphorical role. People talk about “selling your soul” all the time, even atheists; this is a real thing.
A Question on Computer Chess
My son and I were discussing how computers can play certain games. I explained that a computer can easily “solve” Tic Tac Toe–meaning it can consider every possible future state of the board before making a move, and hence will never make a mistake.
However, with chess this is not possible (at least yet). I admitted I didn’t know for sure, but speculated that the computer relies on standard opening sequences, then in the mid-game relies on heuristics involving the “point” system (1 for pawn, 3 for knight, etc.). It was only near the end where the computer could once again revert to brute force and generate its (flawless) moves in an acceptable time.
Does anyone know if that’s right so far? If so, is it right to say that as computing power increases, the earlier in the game that “switch to brute force” becomes possible? In the limit, once that boundary had been extended to the very first move, then the computer would have solved chess. Any computer programmers and/or chess enthusiasts who can add specificity to my BS’ing would be greatly appreciated.
Also, since I was on a roll and just makin’ stuff up, I went this route with it: I speculated that in the middle game, the computer probably relied on a mixture of brute force and “common sense” wisdom from humans’ chess experience. So for example, when considering the various permutations following a particular move, maybe the computer wouldn’t bother chasing down the paths in which the opponent does something apparently “stupid,” like give up his Queen in exchange for a Pawn (with no checkmate imminent). So the computer doesn’t bother exploring those paths too deeply, in which case it might be vulnerable to a big sacrifice that leads to checkmate several moves later. Thoughts?
Potpourri
==> Tom Woods had some great guests on for his “World War I” week. (Tom was against.) You can browse the full archives of his show, but don’t miss the interview with David R. Henderson. Also check out Anthony Gregory talking with Tom about how awful George W. Bush was.
==> I don’t know what else to say about this: The head of the Executive Branch recently admitted that he thought American government officials had engaged in torture. He acted as if this were an open-and-shut case. Well, the United States government passed the “War Crimes Act of 1996,” which specifically lists “torture” as a war crime. So…when’s the grand jury? I guess the hold-up is that Obama has assigned a task force to assemble jurors who’ve never heard of Dick Cheney?
==> By FAR–it’s not even close–the most Shares I’ve gotten on Facebook is when I linked to this Salon article about a new meaning of “literally” going into the dictionary. Is this something worth arguing about? Yes, I understand that we no longer talk as Shakespeare did, but on the other hand if my son says “I goed to the store” I’m going to correct him and say the proper word is “went.”
==> Oh man, I don’t have time to deal with this right now. But David Glasner is talking Hayek/Sraffa debate again, and he’s defending the Austrians while I would defend Sraffa. Weird? We’re in a liquidity trap, everything’s upside down.
==> Michael Tontchev not only read my hard-hitting analysis of the Nordhaus “DICE” model, but Michael pushed it further. Some really cool stuff he found.
==> Bryan Caplan faces off against Scott Sumner.
==> I’m not going to blog separately about this, since I’ve been hitting Krugman too much lately on the issue of inflation, but here ya go. Let me know if you agree that this guy has found damning Krugman textbook quotes, or if this is silly.
==> Pamela J. Stubbart needs her swooning couch, she is so shocked by our sexualized culture. But seriously, I think she makes some great points about the difference between legal permission and social approval.
How Would a Free Society Handle Quarantines?
I tackle this weighty issue at my latest LibertChat post. An excerpt:
In my view, the answer here is not to try to “deduce” the blanket answer from first principles, and declare that in a free society, we would necessarily see either outcome X or outcome Y. Instead, I think we should be humble and acknowledge that one of the supreme virtues of freedom is that its outcomes derive from the contributions and expertise of the millions or billions of people composing the society. We don’t know exactly how a free society would handle a hypothetical outbreak, just like we don’t know how a free society would handle food distribution, education, or transportation.
Not what many of you were expecting, was it? I’m an enigma wrapped in a mystery.
Krugman Wants the Press to Take Sides in Debates, So Long as They Side With Him
As usual with this stuff, I only blog about Krugman and his inner Kontradictions because no one else will have such insight as I…
Now before we jump into Krugman’s latest post, you need some background. Daniel Okrent was the New York Times ombudsman, or what the Times calls the “public editor.” Here is how the NYT currently describes this role:
Margaret Sullivan is the fifth public editor appointed by The New York Times. She writes about the Times and its journalism in a frequent blog – the Public Editor’s Journal — and in a twice-monthly print column in the Sunday Review section. The public editor’s office also handles questions and comments from readers and investigates matters of journalistic integrity. The public editor works independently, outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper; her opinions are her own.
OK, so when Daniel Okrent left this position, he wrote a farewell article in 2005 that contained the following:
Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults. Maureen Dowd was still writing that Alberto R. Gonzales “called the Geneva Conventions ‘quaint’ ” nearly two months after a correction in the news pages noted that Gonzales had specifically applied the term to Geneva provisions about commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Before his retirement in January, William Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess.
No one deserves the personal vituperation that regularly comes Dowd’s way, and some of Krugman’s enemies are every bit as ideological (and consequently unfair) as he is. But that doesn’t mean that their boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., shouldn’t hold his columnists to higher standards.
I didn’t give Krugman, Dowd or Safire the chance to respond before writing the last two paragraphs. I decided to impersonate an opinion columnist.
Everyone got that? The guy had been hired by the NYT to stand up for the readers, to make sure nobody giving them news via the NYT was misleading them. In his opinion, he thought Krugman (and others) weren’t living up to the standards of the NYT, he said so publicly (as he was allowed to do, in his capacity as NYT Public Editor), and he didn’t give Krugman the chance to respond.
Now keep in mind, the NYT itself did give Krugman the chance to respond; here is a catalog of the back-and-forth.
OK, now with that context, check out Krugman’s latest post today, titled “Sliming Rick Perlstein”:
OK, this is grotesque. Rick Perlstein has a new book, continuing his awesomely informative history of the rise of movement conservatism — and he’s facing completely spurious charges of plagiarism.
…
Can I say, I’m familiar with this process? There was a time when various of the usual suspects went around claiming that I was doing illegitimate things with jobs data; what I was doing was in fact perfectly normal — but that didn’t stop Daniel Okrent, the outgoing public editor, from firing a parting shot (with no chance for me to reply) accusing me of fiddling with the numbers. I also heard internally that there were claims of plagiarism directed at me, too, but evidently they couldn’t cook up enough stuff to even pretend to make that stick.
The thing to understand is that fake accusations of professional malpractice are a familiar tactic for these people. And this tactic should be punctured by the press, not given momentum with “opinions differ on shape of the planet” reporting.
Does everyone see the irony here? Krugman wants the press to take sides in these debates, and to not simply give a microphone to “both sides” and let the reader judge who’s right or wrong. He says this, right after complaining about the time the NYT ombudsman declared that Krugman should be held to a higher standard as a NYT columnist, and didn’t let readers hear Krugman’s side of the controversy.
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