Pump Creative
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Energy, Politics | Leave a Comment
Iran not unplugged:
Oil prices on Friday briefly spiked to the highest level in three weeks following a report that Iranian oil exports dropped significantly this month.
…
Benchmark U.S. crude rose by $1.52 to finish at $106.87 per barrel in New York.
Earlier, prices jumped by $2.95 per barrel in 13 minutes to $108.25, the highest price for benchmark crude since March 2.
Brent crude, which is used to price oil imported by U.S. refineries, rose by $1.99 to end at $125.13 in London.
“The market’s a powder keg with a very short fuse,” independent oil analyst and trader Stephen Schork said.
(Illustration found here).
However, the real culprit are those sanctions against Iran, “a real Catch-22 for the global community,” and no amount of drilling and opening pipelines will alter the consequence, unless one is a delusional Republican.
Iranian oil exports have reportedly dropped to 1.9 million barrels a day in March, way down from the 2.6 million a day just last November — the sanctions are to make Iran take stock of its nuclear program, but there’s doubts that will happen, but the reality of those actions is adding a $20 or $30 premium to oil prices.
Although the Iranians have claimed their nuclear program is and always-has been for peaceful purposes — Israel with the US say bullshit — those sanctions are not only making fuel prices climb, but apparently are also pissing off the Iranian leadership.
From Reuters:
“The sanctions are having an effect — it’s just not the effect they were supposed to have,” says Dina Esfandiary, a research analyst and specialist on Iran at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Sanctions are not exerting the desired influence on the regime.
If anything, they may be making them more committed.”
And maybe even richer; this can’t be good, and the whole thing appears to go beyond one of those frightful wait-and-see situations, despite the US pump prices.
This morning, Juan Cole posted a translated article from Javan, an organ of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and thus might explain further the warmongering bombast from the West might be counter-productive.
Cole warns, though: The article should be taken with a grain of salt, but it makes some good points.
Or at least some semblance of a possibility.
One such:
Nuclear Iran writes that an informed source said: “In Stockholm, teams from the CIA (America), Mossad (Israel), MI6 (England), BND (Germany) and DGSE (France) are now discussing one of the main areas of focus in these reports, which is that instead of reducing Iran’s revenue, in the last three months the oil sanctions have increased Iran’s revenues by more than $3 billion.”
One wonders at the whole f*cked-up scenario.
And the backlash: Those prices at the gas pump.
Yesterday, after a visit to the laundromat, I put another $20 worth of gas in my old, now-refurbished, sounding-much-much-better Jeep Comanche at the local Union 76 station (which was robbed at gunpoint early Thursday morning — crook was just wearing a sweatshirt, no hoodie).
Despite it all, the price at $4.49-a-gallon was the same as the last time.
Up here in the north, we’re always higher than anybody else — and gas costs more, too.
Statewide, the California average last week was $4.375 a gallon, a downward-dump of 0.1 of a cent, but yet still nearly 41 cents above the calender record, set just last year — now there’s six states with pump prices at $4-bucks-a-gallon, or more: Illinois, New York and Connecticut last week joined California, Alaska and Hawaii (really not a fun honor).
What’s weird: U.S. refineries continue to export record amounts of fuel, primarily diesel, according to Energy Department statistics. Refiners are exporting at a rate of 3.156 million barrels a day, up 36% from a year ago and double the amount exported five years ago.
All this before the arrival of summer gasoline — accordingly, pump prices most-likely won’t peak until near May, when the more expensive hot-weather fuel hits the market.
And on top of that, US drivers have been using less fuel — in the last year, gasoline consumption dropped by 4.2 billion gallons, or 3 about percent.
And even more weird is no one seems to know what the shit is happening — conspiracy theories with rising pump prices debunked yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle, based on the story, apparently all bullshit, one “…might as well be looking at burnt embers” so summed up at the end; last Wednesday, CNN ran an opinion piece that the spike in gas prices could be blamed on speculators in commodity markets, however, two days later, CNN ran another opinion piece claiming with an expert-like vocabulary, speculators were not to blame; and politics just adds fuel to a huge bullshit fire that more oil on hand will decrease gas prices, bluster and anti-bluster the rule of thumbs: Obama mocked Gingrich’s promise, saying, “They start acting like they’ve got a magic wand and will give you cheap gas forever if you elect us.”
A frightful oddity is even with all this chaos at the gas pump, the concern for what that actual most-desired product does is kind of astounding and seems to create a vicious circle.
Just foolishness, so says Sheriff Taggart: “Somebody’s gotta go back and get a shit-load of dimes!”
Spring Well Sprung
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Energy, Environment, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment
Raining like a mad dog up here on California’s northern coast, and in the pre-dawn hours, cold as shit.
And on this first day of spring, weather is screwed.
And so is the world — the French are hunting for a crazed killer, Mexicans are seeking more killers of police investigating headless bodies, Iraqis are once again cleaning up carnage, and here in the US of A, the reportedly-alleged killer of 16 Afghan civilians can’t remember a thing.
Meanwhile, in line with good news, humanity is on the cusp, life is worse than once thought: Between 1998 and 2010, temperatures rose by 0.11C, 0.04C more than previously estimated.
(Illustration found here).
Heidi Cullen, a scientist at Climate Central, and her column yesterday in the New York Times:
Winter 2012 will go down as the fourth warmest on record for the contiguous United States, according to the National Climatic Center.
And so far, March will be remembered for the more than 2,200 warm temperature records that were set around the nation.
The warm weather, with daytime high temperatures close to 40 degrees above average in some places (high temperature records are outpacing cold records by a ratio of about 19-to-1 so far this March), set the stage for severe thunderstorms that spawned rare, damaging tornadoes near Detroit.
It used to be that a warm day in March felt like a gift, but now it feels as if we’re paying for it.
And the weather waits for nobody.
This morning, central Texas is getting popped with heavy rains and even a tornado southwest of San Antonio, all of which is expected to continue throughout the day — while further north, Chicago (along with a shitload of other mid-west US cities) now has a string of five consecutive days of 80°+ temperatures and there’s no end to the wonder.
Freak weather, but what’s to be expected as the planet heats because the end result (amongst other things) will find itself in the weather — even up here in north California older, local residents say this has been the driest and warmest winter ever.
We might be getting more rain at the end of this season, but it sure won’t be enough.
And it’s a watershed time to be alive.
Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters via Climate Progress and a most-apt description:
As I stepped out of my front door into the pre-dawn darkness from my home near Ann Arbor, Michigan yesterday morning, I braced myself for the cold shock of a mid-March morning.
It didn’t come.
A warm, murky atmosphere, with temperatures in the upper fifties–30 degrees above normal–greeted me instead.
Continuous flashes of heat lightning lit up the horizon, as the atmosphere crackled with the energy of distant thunderstorms.
Beware the Ides of March, the air seemed to be saying.
I looked up at the hazy stars above me, flashing in and out of sight as lightning lit up the sky, and thought, this is not the atmosphere I grew up with.
One would think that was the lede to some science-fiction novel.
But noooooooooo…
It’s just springtime for us and the world.
Pump Politics
Filed Under Bullshit, Energy, Politics | 1 Comment
Sweet, Tiny Tim Geithner waxed philosophical last night, turning a gothic-literary phrase in explaining high US gas prices: Oil moves around in a “dangerous and uncertain world.”
No shit nit-twit sherlock.
And bravely battling this uncertain danger, yesterday I put another $20 worth of gas in my just-back-from-the mechanic Jeep Comanche, pulling the handle at $4.49 a gallon for regular.
Up here in the north we’re higher than a kite (and it ain’t just the bud): California’s retail prices were still rising slightly Wednesday, up 0.2 cents a gallon overnight to an average of $4.363 for a gallon of regular gasoline, according to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report. That’s 40.1 cents a gallon higher than a year earlier.
(Illustration found here).
Picking up on Geithner’s prose: “An overwhelming avalanche of data tells you (U.S.) prices should be lower,” says energy contract trader Dan Dicker, author of Oil’s Endless Bid: Taming the Unreliable Price of Oil to Secure Our Economy. “But with some of these geopolitical problems, it could get worse.” (USATODAY).
And today the source of the pump shock: Brent crude rose 25 cents to $122.85 a barrel by 0927 GMT, after settling down nearly $2 the previous session following a Reuters report that Britian and the United States were preparing to tap into their oil reserves. U.S. crude was 38 cents higher at $105.49 a barrel around the same time.
A situation which has effected the real spending power of US peoples — in January, gas accounted for just 3.8 percent of consumer spending, while last year, when those pumps looked a bit more civilized (pump average: $2.84 a gallon), consumer spending was at 4.8 percent of the budget for middle-income households and 6 percent for lower-middle-income households (Bloomberg).
And in this election year, these high gas-pump prices are banged like a cheap drum, especially by the GOP, which in itself has become nothing more than an empty shell somehow making a lot of loud, noxious noises.
Although those frightening Republican clowns crowing for the 2012 presidential election are attempting to focus on President Obama’s fault with the high gas prices, the facts say otherwise.
Of course, Newt Gingrich can use fuel from his moon colony to help lower pump prices: If elected he’d bring gas prices down to $2.50 a gallon (not enough — Michelle Bachmann said last summer she’d suck prices down to $2 a gallon).
US peoples, however, trust Obama (United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll ): Forty-four percent of respondents trust Obama more “to make the right decisions to help bring down the price of gasoline,” versus 32 percent for Republicans in Congress, according to the poll. Only 1 percent said both; 16 percent said neither and 7 percent didn’t know or refused to answer.
The GOP talk is just bullshit.
Paul Krugman in his New York Times piece this morning:
And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program.
Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment.
So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.
Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise?
Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions.
The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer.
And intellectual bankruptcy, I’m sorry to say, is a problem that no amount of drilling and fracking can solve.
The GOP should just recommend: Take the pump nozzle, hold it hard between your knees and close your eyes.
Pumped Up Bogus
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Energy, Environment | Leave a Comment
Yesterday I felt the first personal shock at the fuel pump when I put another $20 worth of gas in my Jeep Comanche — the gauge screaming now at $4.49 a gallon for regular.
Whoa!
This is 50 cents more than the last time.
Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), I don’t drive much as the Jeep is in fairly bad shape with exhaust and ignition problems, but visiting my local Union 76 still way-sucks through a small straw.
Prices nationwide are up 14 percent so far in 2012, this on the back of a 10 percent rise in oil.
Despite us California folks consuming less gas (2.6 percent less in the past year), the pump still is a bitch: Back in November, California’s average gas price was $3.85 a gallon, up 64 cents from the average a year earlier. But that sounds cheap compared with the state’s average of $4.323 a gallon on Wednesday, according to AAA’s daily survey of fuel retailers.
(Illustration found here).
And apparently there’s no end in sight — despite the price of crude slightly easing.
According to HuffPost this morning:
Benchmark oil for April delivery was down 39 cents to $106.68 at late afternoon Singapore time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The contract rose 52 cents to $107.07 per barrel in New York on Wednesday.
Brent crude rose 2 cents to $122.68 per barrel in London.
The Energy Department said Wednesday that inventories of crude oil rose by 4.2 million barrels last week.
Analysts were expecting an increase of just 1 million barrels.
Demand for gasoline over the four weeks ended Feb. 24 was 6.7 percent lower than a year earlier, the department said.
If we’re driving less, and crude ain’t at some crazy price, WTF with the high pump prices?
One word: Greed.
Commodity trading was suppose to stabilize prices, but asshole speculators are buying oil commodities, betting that they can sell them at a profit when prices go up, thus, making the whole market jell upward, which ends up at the gas pump.
Although these guys never, ever have anything physically to do with oil, their bullshit adds reportedly 25 cents per gallon to the bottom line we see at the gas station.
Senator Bernie Sanders is mad, too.
In a post at CNN this week, Sanders lashed out at the bastards:
A decade ago, speculators controlled only about 30 percent of the oil futures market.
Today, Wall Street speculators control nearly 80 percent of this market.
Many of those people buying and selling oil in the commodity markets will never use a drop of this oil.
They are not airlines or trucking companies who will use the fuel in the future.
The only function of the speculators in this process is to make as much money as they can, as quickly as they can.
…
So as speculators gamble, millions of Americans are paying what amounts to a “speculators tax” to feed Wall Street’s greed.
People who live in rural areas like my home state of Vermont are hit harder than most because they buy gas to drive long distances to their jobs.
In Asia the shit is even higher — Reuters reports this morning: Front-month Brent slipped 18 cent to $122.84 a barrel by 0804 GMT, after settling $1.11 higher at $122.66 in the previous session. U.S. oil slipped 33 cents to $106.74 a barrel after settling 52 cents higher at $107.07.
Prices shift faster than I can type.
And now a side of twister.
One of the nasty results of fossil fuel burning the last 200 years is climate change — a kind of horrible vicious circle where mankind goes bananas about crude oil, searching for it, processing it, selling/buying it, putting it in vehicles to go somewhere to buy shit, staring the whole shebang all over again.
And the whole circle is killing civilization.
An obvious distaste of climate change is how freaked the weather, which is the end result of all that oil/gas bullshit.
In that scope, the middle US was hammered yesterday, killing at least 12 people and spawned more than 20 twisters across Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky in one crazy swoop.
Six people died in Illinois, who were crushed when a house was lifted up and fell on them, authorities said.
And most US peoples at the sight of these examples of “extreme weather” events are pulling their collective head out of their asses.
From Climate Progress:
The number of people who believe that the planet is warming is at its highest level since the fall of 2009.
According to a survey conducted in December 2011 by the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, 62 percent of Americans say they think global warming is happening.
That’s up 7 percent from last spring.
…
Significantly, Americans are attributing their increased belief in global warming to their (correct) perception that the planet is warming and the weather is getting more extreme.
Roughly half of people who believe in global warming said that these were the primary influence.
No shit sherlock — let’s pump it!
Alseep at the Wheel
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Energy, Environment, Madness | Leave a Comment
Sometimes the end tells more than anywhere near the beginning — this the last paragraph from a feature at The Economist on coal usage in Asia and how it does ‘worry’ the rest of the planet, yet why:
So attention is focused on mitigating the harm coal power will do.
Efforts to curb emissions from fossil-fuel power stations by “carbon capture and storage” are still no more than a good idea yet to be realised.
Technologies to make generation cleaner and more efficient are available, however.
But, as the IEA noted understatedly in a report last year, they “are not as widely deployed as they should be.”
And, as the same agency has also argued, time is running out to limit emissions to levels that might keep the global temperature rise to 2°C this century.
On today’s plans, it estimates, that rise will already be locked in by existing buildings and facilities, such as power plants, by 2017.
The rise of Asia has costs, as well as benefits.
My underline emphasis, but that set of words should have been the lede — so what about China and India burning up a mega-shitload of nasty-assed coal?
No new news there, the stress of the point should have been on the time factor — and five quick years ain’t much.
Due to concerns on the acceptable speed of climate change, as reported last month: WA-based scientists have warned of “dire consequences” to the human race after detecting the first signs of dangerous climate change in the Arctic.
The scientists, from the University of WA, claim the region is fast approaching a series of imminent “tipping points” which could trigger a domino effect of large-scale climate change across the entire planet.
The aggravating and frustrating, nearly-overpowering shit, however, was voiced quickly by President Obama during his State of the Union speech in January: The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change.
Amongst all nations, the US appears so politically self-paralyzed in face of the coming way-bad horror to the environment that it could put a fatal drag on the rest of humanity — shitty that.
(Illustration found here).
And the sad part is all this worry about coal/oil/energy is fruitless.
In a discussion on the global financial crisis (GFC), and the peak oil crisis (PO) in relation to each other, this from The Automatic Earth:
1) The GFC and PO are inter-connected: systemic deleveraging that is ongoing from the GFC will feed back into energy supply shortages in the future,
2) the energy crisis is likely to make the disruption and devastation from the GFC feel like a walk in the park for billions of people and
3) the awareness of this crisis, and therefore any mitigating responses at large scales, is completely lacking and most likely will never appear until many people have already been priced out of energy access.
Strange concern for an item that is not only killing the planet via global warming, but will soon too become an added festered thorn in a dying civilization — can the US and the world pull itself out of a deep, fat sleep?