Iraqi Oil Production Reaches Post-Invasion High

Some Considerations in Spent Fuel Pool Fires

This morning, I read the Brookhaven National Labs report Severe Accidents in Spent Fuel Pools in Support of Generic Safety Issue 82 from 1987.  This is an analysis of the risk of large scale radioactivity release from the spent fuel stored onsite in a water pool at a nuclear reactor, in the case that an accident caused a loss of the water in the pool.  This is something that now may have happened (for the first time) in the pool at Fukushima-Daiichi.

The document is long and complex, and there are many very significant uncertainties - to the point where I judge that no-one will be able to reliably predict what may happen in this particular accident.  However, the key points seem to me as follows:

Comment Moderation Turned On

Well, our would-be troll has not taken a hint.  I was initially completely skeptical of the possibility that Ugo raised, that someone might be being paid to disrupt my blog (no doubt amongst many others).  However, kjmclark notes that online astroturf campaigns are definitely happening in some places, and I guess I don't doubt that this is well within the depths of depravity that some vested interests and their PR firms are willing to sink to (though what makes them think that this will persuade anyone, I don't know - certainly that's not the impulse it creates in me).  And clearly the troll in question has no intent of making an effort to follow whatever social norm I might establish here, and is instead being deliberately disruptive.  There is an air of continued determination about the effort which would be consistent with someone being paid - either that or a well-entrenched personality disorder.

At any rate, to allow me to head the situation off at the pass, I have now enabled comment moderation on all comments.  This will obviously mean that comments are a little less timely, and I apologize for that.  I think the trade-off is well worth it.  Possibly the situation will blow over.  If not, I may eventually appoint trusted moderators from amongst regular commenters willing to volunteer.  One way or another, I will host a civilized discussion of these issues amongst people of open minds and good intent; everyone in that category (which as far as I can tell includes all recent commenters but one) should continue to comment at will...

Japan Sliding Towards Worst Case

According to the chair of the US nuclear regulator:

The chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave a significantly bleaker appraisal of the threat posed by Japan’s nuclear crisis than the Japanese government, saying on Wednesday that the damage at one crippled reactor was much more serious than Japanese officials had acknowledged and advising to Americans to evacuate a wider area around the plant than the perimeter established by Japan.

The announcement marked a new and ominous chapter in the five-day long effort by Japanese engineers to bring four side-by-side reactors under control after their cooling systems were knocked out by an earthquake and tsunami last Friday. But it also created a split between Washington and Tokyo, after American officials concluded that the Japanese warnings were insufficient, and that, deliberately or not, they had understated the potential threat of what is taking place inside the nuclear facility.

Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the commission, said in Congressional testimony that the commission believed that all the water in the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station had boiled dry, leaving fuel rods stored there exposed and bleeding radiation. As a result, he said, “We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.”

If his analysis is accurate and Japanese workers have been unable to keep the spent fuel at that inoperative reactor properly cooled — it needs to remain covered with water at all times — radiation levels could make it difficult not only to fix the problem at reactor No. 4, but to keep workers at the Daiichi complex from servicing any of the other problem reactors at the plant.

Seems like there is a real potential to have several simultaneous not-fully-contained meltdowns here.

Saudi oil production increased in February

Chernobyl as a Worst Case for Japan

IEA Confirms New Highs of Fuel Production

A very short note on Japan

The New York Times has been doing an absolutely stirling job on reporting on the disaster in Japan, both the aftermath of the tsunami itself, and the evolving crises at the stricken nuclear plants.  The situation seems increasingly ominous:

Japan’s nuclear crisis verged toward catastrophe on Tuesday after an explosion damaged the vessel containing the nuclear core at one reactor and a fire at another spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to statements from Japanese government and industry officials.

In a brief morning address to the nation Tokyo time, Prime Minister Naoto Kan pleaded for calm, but warned that radiation had already spread from the crippled reactors and there was “a very high risk” of further leakage.

The sudden turn of events, after an explosion Monday at one reactor and then an early-morning explosion Tuesday at yet another — the third in four days at the plant — already made the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl reactor disaster a quarter century ago.

Engineers at the plant, working at tremendous personal risk, on Tuesday continued efforts to cool down the most heavily damaged unit, reactor No. 2, by pumping in seawater. According to government statements, most of the 800 workers at the plant had been withdrawn, leaving 50 or so workers in a desperate effort to keep the cores of three stricken reactors cooled with seawater pumped by firefighting equipment, while crews battled to put out the fire at the No. 4 reactor, which they claimed to have done just after noon on Tuesday.

But late Tuesday, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said a pool storing spent fuel rods at that fourth reactor had overheated and reached boiling point and had become unapproachable by workers at the plant. The fire earlier Tuesday morning was sparked by a hydrogen explosion generated by rising temperatures at the fuel pool, which released radioactivity directly into the atmosphere.

I don't have much value to add at present.  However, I have been deeply impressed at the ability of nuclear facilities to act as a multiplier of other kinds of disasters.  A tsunami destroying a sizeable chunk of a country's coast is enough of a disaster, and yet here it's almost overshadowed by the potential for this nuclear power plant to start irradiating much of Japan, and indeed the western Pacific.

So one lesson I've taken away is that I want to understand nuclear hazards much better than I do at present. In particular, the way in which nuclear plants are dependent on the correct functioning of other infrastructure just to stay intact at all is not something I appreciated prior to this incident.

Libyan Oil Production Down 230kbd in February

OPEC: Global Oil Production Increased in February

Latest Ice Sheet Mass Balance Stats (Take 2)

Japanese Tsunami

There was an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and devastating tsumani in Japan overnight.  This video is from al-Jazeera and has just incredible footage of the disaster (not for the faint of heart - I found it quite upsetting to watch).  The loss of life must be staggering, and many people will have had their lives turned upside down.



I imagine the economic damage to Japan will be significant too, but it will take a while until the situation becomes clear.

Climate Denialist Comments

I have found it necessary to begun deleting comments of a particular commenter who appears to be a climate change sceptic/denier.  On reflection, it seems worth saying a little more about that.

I certainly don't want to impose a litmus test on commenters broadly.  If I get the feeling that people are looking at my posts, or other comments, genuinely curious about the issues, thinking for themselves, and making whatever points about the issues occur to them in good faith, or asking questions, I have no problem with that.  There have been occasions when I thought a particular climate paper was overblown, and I've said so.

However, there is clearly a large climate denialist movement that is a) heavily funded by moneyed interests, and b) also supported by a bunch of people who don't have have a direct current pecuniary interest but are unable to admit even to themselves that (for example) their career in fossil fuel extraction was contributing to major harm to the climate, or are very ideologically rigid and cannot admit that maybe sometimes free markets and large businesses commit significant harm as well as causing much good.

I think the climate denialist movement is almost 100% in bad faith, and if I get the feeling that someone is basically parroting the standard talking points from it, bringing up all the bogus non-issues that it manufactures (eg Climategate) I just have zero interest in providing a forum for that.  It's my blog, I read all the comments, and I don't want to read ones like that (or the inevitable equally partisan backlash from the other side).  Find a different forum (there are plenty of both persuasions who will be happy to indulge you in endlessly rehashing that stuff).  There's clearly tremendous potential for comment threads here to devolve into yet one more long trollfest on those issues, and I will not allow that to happen.

My interest is to understand and evaluate the actual climate science - what is it saying, how much reliance on it can we safely place, what does it tell us about our future?  Anyone who, in my judgement, shares a genuine desire to do the same, and a commitment that finding out the truth is more important than promoting a particular ideology, is more than welcome to comment here.

Latest Ice Sheet Mass Balance Stats

This following post is incorrect because I misread the main graph (h/t to Mike Aucott for pointing this out). I have left it here for the historical record, but you should read this one instead.

Saudi Day of Rage Tomorrow

The Guardian has a good backgrounder:

Saudi Arabia shares many problems common to the Arab world – a youth "bulge," lack of opportunities for graduates, precious few political freedoms, plus an absence of transparency and accountability by an absolute monarchy that includes 8,000 princes. Restrictions on women – who are not allowed to drive and cannot travel abroad without the permission of a male relative – are another big negative. The notorious religious police are another. Torture is frequently used on detainees. Unemployment between the ages of 14 and 24 is 40% – in a country where almost 70% of the population is under 20.

Demands for change are relatively modest. Of three reform petitions circulating on the internet, one has gathered signatures from 1,500 prominent liberal and Islamist Saudis calling for a constitutional monarchy, an elected parliament and an accountable executive. Entitled Towards a Country with Rights and Institutions, it is couched in polite and formal language and starts by wishing the king good health. It is a far cry from the slogans heard in Tunis, Cairo and Tripoli. But online access was still quickly blocked.

A "youth petition" signed by 60 journalists and cyber-activists calls for political liberalisation and lowering the average age of ministers to 40 and of shura council members to 45. "There is a new generation of people who are more liberal," says a senior Saudi journalist, "but they still respect the old red lines."

Many Saudi liberals insist the king is a well-intentioned reformist, if one limited by his age and experience. Khaled al-Maeena, editor of the Jeddah-based Arab News, is one of them. "People are adamant that the day of rage will not be about throwing stones and shouting slogans, so there shouldn't be an over-reaction."

I don't feel like I have any insight here, as to whether tomorrow will be a total fizzle, or the first crack in the regime.  There's a great deal at stake.

Interpreting Recent Oil Price Moves

Working Age Employment/Population Ratios

Farm Prices, Food Prices, and Biofuels

Food Prices Rose Again in February

Global Biofuel Production

Hope for Libyan Oil Production?

This is interesting:

In Benghazi, rebels have said that Libyan soldiers had joined the rebels in securing vital oil industry facilities around that part of the country. Some oil industry workers fleeing across the Tunisian border in recent days said they had seen Libyan soldiers fire their weapons to drive off foreign mercenaries or other security forces who had approached oil facilities not far from here.

Hassan Bulifa, who sits on the management committee of the Arabian Gulf Oil Company, the country’s largest oil producer, said Sunday that the rebels control at least 80 percent of the country’s oil assets, and that his company, based in Benghazi, was cooperating with them. The company resumed oil shipments on Sunday, loading two tankers at a port in Tobruk, Mr. Bulifa said. The ships — one bound for Austria and the other for China — represented the company’s first shipments since Feb. 10.

Although the revenue from those sales goes the company’s umbrella organization, Libya’s National Oil Company, Mr. Bulifa said Arabian Gulf Oil had ceased any coordination with the national company, though it was honoring oil contracts. And he insisted the proceeds would ultimately flow to the rebels, not Colonel Qaddafi. “Qaddafi and his gangsters will not have a hand on them,” he said. “We are not worried about the revenues.”

Too soon to know how much emphasis to place on this, but certainly worth watching. If the rebels can keep society organized well enough for the oil to keep flowing, the externalities to the rest of the world will be a lot less severe.  Money to fund the rebellion, too. Qaddafi has certainly made himself a pariah at this point, and it's devoutly to be hoped that the rebels succeed both in displacing him, and in creating a better society afterwards.

US Ethanol Production

Unrest in Oman

Some Basic Sanity Checks on the NYT Radioactivity Piece

Radioactivity in Shale Gas Drilling Wastewater

The New York Times has an extremely eye-opening investigative piece this morning, looking at the issue of radioactivity in wastewater from shale gas hydrofraccing, mainly in Pennsylvania.

The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater.

Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state officials. Some of it has been sent to other states, including New York and West Virginia.

Yet sewage treatment plant operators say they are far less capable of removing radioactive contaminants than most other toxic substances. Indeed, most of these facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive material to meet federal drinking-water standards before discharging the wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking-water intake plants.

No, no, no, no!

Bloomberg:

Spain will lower highway speed limits, cut train ticket prices and use more biofuel under an emergency energy-saving initiative because of soaring oil prices brought on by unrest in Libya, an official said Friday.

and

Finally, oil companies will also have to add more bio-fuel to the gasoline and diesel they produce — from the current mandatory 5.8 percent proportion, up to 7 percent, the deputy prime minister said.

Emphasis mine. This is an unbelievably counterproductive thing to do. A significant part of the cause of the unrest in the Middle East is due to high food prices. The regimes are all rushing out buying food in an attempt to appease their populations. The unrest is now sharply increasing oil prices, and the geniuses in the Spanish government want to respond by calling for more food to be converted into biofuel, thus further increasing the strain on food prices?

Nine Million Barrels/Day?

Why Can't Saudi Crude Replace Libyan?

Libyan Oil Grinding to a Halt

Here's the latest:

At least 300kbd-400kbd of oil production are shut-in already, and likely more, but the situation is still confusing.

As much as a quarter of Libyan oil output has been shut down, Reuters calculations showed on Wednesday, as unrest prompted oil companies to warn of production cuts in Africa's third-largest producer.

Austria's OMV said on Wednesday it might be heading for a full production shutdown in Libya. Total, Repsol, Eni and BASF have also said they are either slowing or stopping output.

The latest comments point to a growing impact on oil output from Libya, which produces 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) of high-quality oil, or almost 2 percent of world output. About 1.3 million bpd is exported, mainly to Europe.

According to Time Magazine's Robert Baer, anonymous sources close to Gaddafi say he is now giving orders to sabotage Libya's oil industry:

There's been virtually no reliable information coming out of Tripoli, but a source close to the Gaddafi regime I did manage to get hold of told me the already terrible situation in Libya will get much worse. Among other things, Gaddafi has ordered security services to start sabotaging oil facilities. They will start by blowing up several oil pipelines, cutting off flow to Mediterranean ports. The sabotage, according to the insider, is meant to serve as a message to Libya's rebellious tribes: It's either me or chaos.

Libyan ports are shutting down:

Libyan cargo port operations have shut down due to increasing violence sweeping the country, Reuters has reported.

Operations at Tripoli, Benggazi and Misurata Mediterranean ports, which handle general cargo and container shipping, have closed.

In particular, oil exports appear to be halting completely:

Operations at Libyan oil ports were disrupted by a lack of communications, trade sources said, and flows from marine oil terminals in Libya were halted on Tuesday, an Italian government source said.

"The situation is worrying. This morning the oil terminals were blocked in Libya," the government source said.

It was not possible to get through by phone to Libyan oil ports or shipping agents on Tuesday.

"Everything is out," said a source with a major oil company. "We can't get through to anyone. Our operations people say contact is impossible with the shipping agents, port officials, anyone. The lines are all down."

The country appears to be descending into civil war:

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya kept his grip on the capital on Wednesday, but large areas of the east of the country remained out of his control amid indications that the fighting had reached the northwest of the country around Tripoli.

Libyans fleeing across the country’s western border to Tunisia reported fighting over the past two nights in the town of Sabratha, home of an important Roman archeological site 50 miles west of Tripoli. Reuters reported that thousands of Libyan forces loyal to Col. Qaddafi had deployed there.

“The revolutionary committees are trying to kill everyone who is against Qaddafi,” said a doctor from Sabratha who had just left the country, but who declined to give his name because he wanted to return.

Of course, as for the oil production losses, the Saudi's say they stand ready to make up the difference:

“OPEC is ready to meet any shortage in supply when it happens,” the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said at a news conference after a meeting of ministers of oil producing and consuming nations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “There is concern and fear, but there is no shortage.”

The next few months' oil statistics are going to be interesting, to say the least. It now seems increasingly likely that Libya's oil production (about 1.6mbd) is largely going to halt, or at least not get exported.  So we will see if Saudi Arabia's production really will rise to compensate. The problem, of course, is that Mr al-Naimi's idea of what constitutes a "shortage" may not be the same as the rest of us.

OPEC Stability Watch

Libyan Oil Production

Brent-WTI spread

Chinese Railway Chief Fired

Some very interesting reporting in the NYT this morning:

In his seven years as chief of the Chinese Railways Ministry, Liu Zhijun built a commercial and political colossus that spanned continents and elevated the lowly train to a national symbol of pride and technological prowess.

His abrupt sacking by the Communist Party is casting that empire in a decidedly different light, raising doubts not only about Mr. Liu’s stewardship and the corruption that dogs China’s vast public-works projects, but also, perhaps, the safety, financial soundness and long-term viability of a rail system that has captured the world’s attention.

History of Democracy Question

Jamais Cascio seems to have suddenly returned to the blogosphere, and has a post worrying about various possible signs and indicators of decay in American democracy.  I've also been thinking a lot about democracy in light of events in the Middle East.  In particular, I have the impression that once democracy is well entrenched in a culture, it's actually very difficult to dislodge, and that US democracy will prove much more robust than Jamais worries.

Clearly, some autocratic countries become democratic briefly, and then lapse back into some form of autocracy.  The Weimar republic lasted from 1919 to 1933, for example, before Hitler effectively abrogated the constitution.  However, I can't think of any case, in the modern era, of a multi-generational democracy that has ever reverted back.  For example, Britain managed to lose an entire empire without ever any serious threat to its status as a democratic country.  Britain and the US made it through two world wars and a great depression without losing their democratic status.  Indeed the US managed to fight a civil war with itself, without either side actually giving up on the democratic form of governance.

So my question is this: what is the longest period that a country has been a democracy, and then reverted to some non-democratic form of government?  Let's confine it to the post-industrial revolution era.

Right now, the longest case I've found is Chile - if I'm understanding the history correctly, Chile was a democracy from 1932 to 1973 - 41 years - before the government was overthrown in a military coup.  Are there any cases more pronounced than that?

Do Mediterranean Crop Yields Show Climate Stress?

Climate Change Wrecks Agricultural Yields! (Not)

Deleveraging Accelerates Slightly in Q4

What We Use Crop Land For

OPEC Production

Energy and Wealth Aren't *That* Proportional

New Highs of Liquid Fuel Production in January

What did we Learn From the Saudi Cables?

All The Guardian Saudi Oil Cables

At present, I have found five Wikileaks cables that the Guardian has published which concern Saudi Arabian oil production and reserves. Here are links to each one, in chronological order, and a short excerpt to give the flavor:

Wikileaks confirms Saudi Reserve Overstatement

The Guardian has a very interesting piece for us keen Saudi watchers:

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.

Emphasis mine.  Also...

Chicago in Context

Latest Saudi Arabian Oil Production Statistics

January Employment Data

Long Term Trends in Economic Output

Food Prices Up Again in January

The FAO reported this morning on their latest global food commodity price index for January, and it rose 3.4% from Dec 2010 to Jan 2011 (which was already higher than during the 2008 food price shock).

Why Oil Matters More Than Rubber

I was thinking about Paul Krugman's Cross of Rubber column, and in particular the associated blog post Commodities: This Time is Different.  My take on Krugman is that he's an extremely brilliant guy who's been thinking about economics for a good long time.  His enormous knowledge and insight are invaluable, and I pay close attention to his writing.  However, I also think he's gotten into some pretty deeply scripted habits of thinking based on past events and isn't paying close enough attention to the ways in which the present and the future are likely to be different than the past.  In particular, his frame of reference for the events of the last few years has been past deflationary episodes such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and Japan in the 1990s.

Contango, Oil Stocks, and OPEC Economic Thought

Oil Shock Potential of OPEC Nations

Self Immolations in Saudi Arabia

In both Tunisia and Egypt, the main demonstrations were preceded by desperate individuals publicly setting themselves on fire as a protest against the hopelessness of their lives, or their treatment by their respective regimes.

In Tunisia, the first person to do this was on December 17th, but it took until January 4th for him to die.  Protests built over several weeks, until President Ben-Ali was obliged to flee the country on January 14th.

In Egypt, the first self immolations were on January 19th, and now, 12 days later, although the outcome is uncertain, the regime hangs by a thread.

So far, there have been two self-immolations in Saudi Arabia: a 60 year old man on January 22nd, and a 42 year old on January 25th.  So far, demonstrations have been limited to a few hundred people (video here) in Jeddah, mostly protesting that the government had failed to prevent devastating floods there.  Demonstrations are not allowed in Saudi Arabia, and the authorities arrested tens of the protesters.  I am not presently able to find any evidence of the self-immolations leading to further protest (feel free to provide any further links in comments).

Demographics and Wealth in MENA

Weekend Blog: Virtue Can be its Own Reward

Minor note.  I just received the NYSEG bill for a month of heating and powering our Victorian farmhouse in upstate New York, with 100% renewable electricity in the middle of winter: $429.36.  Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at our bills from the same time last year, when we paid to heat and power a similar aged (1880) almost identical sized rental house in Sausalito, California: $462.11.

In Sausalito, the bill was for about half natural gas and half electricity of whatever provenance PG&E chose to provide (ie mostly not renewable).  Here the electricity is supplied by Sterling Planet via Agway Electric, and delivered by NYSEG.

The main difference is that the house here, having been owner occupied, is insulated to a more-or-less average contemporary standard, whereas the rental house in Sausalito was not (presumably because the landlords had had no incentive to do so).  Also, electricity here is somewhat cheaper than in the Bay Area.  These effects are enough to more than overcome the difference between about 3000 degree days and about 8000 degree days, as well as the premium for renewable power.

My smugness knows no bounds following this bill :-)

Oil, Food, and the Wealth of MENA Countries

The Kids are Stressed Out

US Revenues and Outlays

The latest CBO projections for the US government deficit.  Note the break in the y-axis. The report came out today.

Obama on Energy and Climate

Here is the portion of President Obama's State of the Union Address devoted to energy and climate, followed by my reaction:

Chinese Oil Consumption Growth

Creating a Toaster From Scratch

Want to know what civilization does for you?  This video is one man's account of trying to build a toaster from scratch himself starting from raw materials (iron ore, oil for the plastic, etc).  I mean, you already know how that's going to turn out, right?  Still, it's pretty eye opening to follow the details.

Hat tip Ran Prieur.

Growth Was So Faster in the Post War Years

Kevin Drum tries to set Matt Yglesias straight, arguing that this logarithmic graph of real GDP demonstrates that growth has not been any slower in the past thirty years than the previous thirty years:

Expensive Potatoes, Cheap French Fries

Paul Krugman commented the other day on this article in Commodities Now by John Kemp.  The article's main thesis is:

Leading commentators such as Martin Wolf in the Financial Times and Paul Krugman in the New York Times argue the problem facing the global economy is lack of sufficient demand; the remedy is some combination of fiscal and monetary expansion. But sharply rising commodity prices suggest global growth is already hitting supply-side limits. The problem is not aggregate demand but its distribution.

Until firms significantly raise productivity, especially resource efficiency, the painful remedy is likely to involve increased competitiveness and reduced living standards across North America and Western Europe (through a combination of commodity price inflation, weaker exchange rates, higher import prices and falling real wages and incomes).

There is not much Keynesian demand management can do in the face of this sort of structural shift. Central bank policies are simply shuffling costs around (from borrowers and banks to savers and pension funds) while stoking further increases in food and energy prices.

This is the implication of the syndrome I christened misflation the other day (and since I haven't see any other term in general circulation yet, I'm going to stick with mine for now).

Anyway, Krugman responds:

Weekend Blog: Living in the Country makes you Smarter!

Well, roughly.  Via Andrew Sullivan, here's an interesting paper which compared the cognitive performance of undergraduates after taking a walk in a natural environment (a university arboretum) versus taking a walk on busy city streets.

We compare the restorative effects on cognitive functioning of interactions with natural versus urban environments. Attention restoration theory (ART) pro- vides an analysis of the kinds of environments that lead to improvements in directed-attention abilities. Nature, which is filled with intriguing stimuli, modestly grabs attention in a bottom-up fashion, allowing top-down directed-attention abilities a chance to replenish. Unlike natural environments, urban environments are filled with stimulation that captures attention dramatically and ad- ditionally requires directed attention (e.g., to avoid being hit by a car), making them less restorative. We present two experiments that show that walking in nature or viewing pictures of nature can improve directed-attention abilities as measured with a backwards digit-span task and the Attention Network Task, thus validating attention resto- ration theory.

Romanticism is not New

There is an interesting essay by Michael Lind in Salon, America in the age of primitivism. Lind bemoans the irrationality of modern politics on both sides of the right-left divide:

A case can be made that yes, we are indeed in a period of rising irrationalism. This irrationalism permeates our politics, from the right to the center to the left. And it has done so for some time.

and he makes that case at greater length:

Back Problems...

On an administrative note: I hurt my back on Monday and am under physical therapist's orders not to sit up.  That has cramped my blogging style more than a little!  It has started to improve and I hope to return to light blogging tomorrow (albeit from a near horizontal position...).

December Liquid Fuel Production

OPEC: December Global Oil Supply Flat at New Peak

NY Times: US involved in Stuxnet

As far as I can see, the NY Times is burying the lead in this story.  I think the most important news is:

Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.

In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton separately announced that they believed Iran’s efforts had been set back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited American-led sanctions, which have hurt Iran’s ability to buy components and do business around the world.

Chevy Volt Availability Gossip

I had to come out to California on business this week.  Last night, I took the opportunity to go into the San Jose Chevy dealership to inquire about the Volt.  They have seen three total.  One came in a couple of weeks ago, and sold in an hour for $10k over list.  Two more came in Wednesday morning, and both sold by Thursday afternoon at $8k over list to a business owner who had come in from out of town and was on his third different city trying to buy Volts.  I got to sit in those two, but not test drive them.

So, based on this one data point, it's not exactly impossible to buy a Volt at present, but it's certainly not easy.  It's not like they are back-ordered for months, but you'd probably have to sit in a major urban area where they are available, make friends with all the dealerships, and then be ready to pay well over list when one showed up.

This particular dealership said they had only 40 allocated to them for all of 2011.  So it could be a while till things settle down.

Misflation

Environmentalism ≠ Socialism

Yesterday's Archdruid report triggers me to write a post I've been meaning to write for a while, which is to make the following point: the project of transforming society to use less resources, have less environmental impact, or emit less carbon, does not necessarily have anything to do with the project of making society more equal.  Environmentalism != Socialism, to reduce it to a bumper sticker.

Employment for Young American Men

Food Price Break-out

New High in Food Commodity Prices

Latest Global Oil Price/Production Plot

Kuwaiti Oil Production

State of the Blog, Q4 2010

Pete Postlethwaite, RIP

I see from the NYT that character actor Pete Postlethwaite has died:

Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite, a craggy-faced British character actor described by director Steven Spielberg as "the best actor in the world," has died at age 64 after a long battle with cancer.

Friend and journalist Andrew Richardson said Monday that Postlethwaite died in a hospital Sunday.

The actor was instantly recognizable for his unusually shaped face — with prominent cheekbones that gave him a lean, rugged look — and his intense eyes. He was not conventionally handsome like many film stars but had a powerful presence and authenticity on screen and on stage.

This would normally be of no interest to this blog, but...