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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/03/2019 in all areas

  1. 2 points
    @Old-RuffneckI am an operator and a producer, I don't "invest" in the shale oil industry by buying shares in E&P stocks. I would not do that if you held a gun to my head. I proudly pay federal income taxes every year because I actually make money as a producer. Its the American way. I've hit my lick; my only interest in the shale oil phenomena is that I am concerned for the long term hydrocarbon future of my country and our kids. The shale oil industry is a decade old and a little south of $300B in debt including a WAG at private debt. There are now close to 500 different operators drilling HZ wells in the Permian and they have borrowed heavily in the past four years. Prices have averaged $74 during that decade. Net operating losses over then decade and the fact that the shale oil industry has not paid federal income taxes is interesting to me and proof that it has NEVER been profitable. The fact that it can carry forward those losses and likely not pay federal income taxes, even if the price of oil goes to $100, kinda sucks, you bet. If it's finding costs are limited to interest paid on debt, and it never pays that debt back, its sort of like drilling free wells. Its pissing off associated gas like its nothing and is so unprofitable it has never paid taxes. Everybody in America is mesmerized by this shale shit and I think its a little dumb. Its a novelty that has lasted as long as it has because of credit. We need for it be sustainable but ignoring its warts are not going to get that done.
  2. 2 points
    This entire article above is some kind of Public Relations Press Release for New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham .......... Having read it, i see nothing that is likely to actually occur in the time frame described...... - America is NOT going to join the Paris Climate agreement.. - private companies will build charging stations as market conditions show they are needed, NOT THE GOVERNMENT... and NONE should be built until there is an established STANDARDIZED PART for such stations, a "standard" that DOES NOT YET EXIST......! - the teenagers that you are talking about will be middle-aged before the demand for oil as transportation fuel declines in any way....... - EV's will not be "mainstream" in any meaningful way for some time, as the battery and charging problems have not yet been resolved... - The GREEN DEAL as described so far is a monstrous JOKE..........
  3. 2 points
    Meanwhile in Texas... I was surprised to read in the Houston Chronicle that wind provided over 15% of the Texas’ electricity in 2017. Land is cheap in the panhandle. Major markets are only a few hundred miles away. Transmission lines are getting to close to capacity though as supply has increased dramatically. Most planned installations are going to wind pockets close to the gulf coast to supply the burgeoning refinery industry. Go figure. Don’t look for offshore anytime soon as there are plenty of cheaper onshore sites available.
  4. 1 point
    "It said that its modeling shows gas production in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania will start falling short of demand by 2022, and that by 2025, annual gas production offshore Victoria will more than halve from current levels, dropping to 146 PJ from 336 PJ in 2018." Here. So solar and wind are not growing fast enough, then?
  5. 1 point
    There is " NOTHING DEMOCRATIC " about the "Democrat Party".......... The Democrats are the worlds greatest party-poopers...... If you want something to get totally screwed up, you ask the Democrats to "fix" it.......... The "special interest groups that own the Democrat party" are all about two things: POWER and MONEY...... Should the USA be unlucky enough to have another Democrat President, or Senate Majority, you can bet that whatever is done in reference to the "oil reserve", or anything else, will revolve around those two things...... The current RINO led Republican party leadership tries to do the same thing that the Democats do, but the RINO's are just not as successful at messing things up as the Democrats are......
  6. 1 point
    Hello Jim: Welcome to the site. You covered many different points. But having read what you wrote, i do not understand what your "point" is... I think that you are wanting to talk about the THREATS TO THE OIL INDUSTRY... But i am not sure... (OIL FOR GASOLINE.... ? OIL FOR ELECTRICITY GENERATION......? ) You mention both....... WHICH OIL INDUSTRY ? ....... THERE ARE SEVERAL.......... OIL IS USED ALL OVER THE PLACE..........
  7. 1 point
    Are you referring to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, oil held by the government in case of emergency, or simply petroleum under US soil?
  8. 1 point
    Depends on what end of the spectrum that Democrat(if able to win)is on. Much of the current shale oil boom, well, what’s left of it, was under the Obama administration. If a Democrat from the AOC or Gov. Inslee spectrum, you can immediately expect government regulation that will choke an industry that is already gasping for air. I suspect a Democrat from the wrong or right end of that parties spectrum, depending on your perspective, would certainly hasten what massive debt and unprofitability has started. The economics of it will surely slow if not altogether stop plundering of our last known significant available oil.
  9. 1 point
    Meredith - sorry but all of this and the rest of your post is old. If you don't want to accept the memo then don't, that's up to you. But then don't lecture us about lithium-ion batteries when we've being living them for years. The problem is that at the moment power grid managers have to arrange their grids in the expectation that, for unknown periods, all but a fraction of the renewable energy on it won't be operating. Either that or (as happens in Australia where I live) demand is balanced with supply by asking major industrial users to stop operations or make their own arrangements (diesel generators). Industrial scale storage by anything short of a dam is not feasible at the moment. Major batteries have their uses in grid management but cannot be used on an industrial scale. Other means of storing energy have been discussed on this site. Anyway, leave it with you.
  10. 1 point
    The shortened lifespans are affected by diabetes and obesity but the main cause right now is deaths from opiate overdoses. It has a much greater effect because of younger people dying.
  11. 1 point
  12. 1 point
    I suppose if something is debunked enough times it becomes true. In the meantime... Power storage is pretty much as old as modern scientific understanding of electricity, since the original sources of electricity were batteries (unless you're Benjamin Franklin flying a kite). Lead acid and lithium ion batteries are real - not particularly cost effective, but households have used them for power storage for years, if not decades. It's not a matter of whether it can be done at all, it's simply a matter of relative cost. Solar and wind power are definitely getting cheaper over time. Electrical storage technologies are also getting cheaper, just not as quickly - so far. There is a lot of confusion about various fuel sources, such as coal vs. natural gas vs. nuclear since these have their associated costs. Coal costs have remained relatively constant, however this isn't too helpful when costs of competitors, such as natural gas, are declining. The same goes for nuclear - nuclear plants built today aren't any simpler than plants built in the 1960's, and nuclear plant construction isn't any more competent. CCGT is a major simplification over conventional coal fired boilers - particularly if pollution control is included. Solar prices shrink, CCGT prices shrink (particularly with respect to fuel prices), wind prices shrink, so people whose life or investments are wrapped up in fossil fuels yells 'solar isn't competitive'. It takes a certain amount of energy to make a solar cell, and it takes that energy plus a bit more to make a solar panel. If natural gas prices decline, then the cost of gas fired electricity also declines, lowering at least one input cost to cell manufacture. If the natural gas well uses solar panels for it's instrumentation, then the natural gas price cost is reflective of the money saved from not running a power line to the instrumentation unit. If it is too expensive to build a 'base load' power plant in oil country, then wind turbines are installed to meet incremental demand. Therefore, all these prices interact with each other like so many vines wrapped around the same tree trunk. In the late 1980's I was being told by people that should have known better that 'housing prices have never declined in the US'. Whether that's true is less material than whether mortgage holders can continue to afford making payments on their houses. There was a 'first time' when that condition reversed, and mortgage holders were forced to default. Just because gas and oil have 'always' been 'the cheapest' and the 'most reliable' doesn't mean such a situation is guaranteed 'forever'. The question isn't the abstraction of 'well it won't happen in our lifetimes', it's 'where is the cost intersection in time, and what influences the displacement of that intersection?'.
  13. 1 point
    NIck, you want to be cautious about taking "World Bank" numbers as gospel. It is a bureaucratic institution with its own scissors to go sharpen. The actual "global" replacement rate is quite a bit lower than what they pronounce, just a tad above a stabilized rate, but even that disappears within a decade. After that, it is all downhill in population, in some places in dramatic fashion. There remains a difference between "fertility rate" and survival to reproductive age, that difference being combined of infant mortality and the adolescent death rate. Overall, the reproduction rate is directed by the huge-population countries, the "biggies" being India and China. So let's take a look at them. China had a massive population fecundity and expansion rate(s), so the Communist leadership instituted the one-child policy for some years. This had two unforeseen results: an over-leveraged population drop-off, and a skewed reproduction of males. The girl fetuses were aborted due to sex-selection techniques, and obviously if you abort enough girl fetuses, then you don't have the numbers base to continue the population base. Although China shows up as having dropped off in "live births per woman" from 5.75 to 1.62, remember that you also have a huge drop-off in the number of women that survive to fecundity. So it is not as if the population in total is reproducing at the 1.62 rate; it is quite a bit lower than that, simply because you start from a dramatically reduced number of women arriving at the point of reproduction in the first place. It has now gotten so extreme in China that enforced celibacy itself is becoming a societal norm, much to the chagrin of the young males: there are just no women around to court and marry. So these males are busy importing wife candidates from Southeast Asia. That becomes a hidden migration shift, but also removes those women from high-fecundity locations such as Indonesia (2.36) and Vietnam (already down to 1.95, below replacement) into China, already precariously down to 1.62. Now looking at India, the World Bank number of 2.33 looks alarming, but remember that "live births" does not translate to fecund females in twenty years. A number of those live births will not survive. The true inter-generation population rate is thus lower, and while you will get these arguments among the number-crunch crowd, it still results in a lower growth than "live births" would suggest or imply. You will see this dramatically in places such as South Africa, where the live-birth rate is now 2.46, but remember that some 25% of the population is infected with HIV, a catastrophic infection rate that will assure that a number of those live births today will be sterile or dead in 20 years. The raw numbers do not account for that. There will also be adult population shrinkage due to deaths from AIDS infection, again not reflected in World Bank numbers data. Overall, world population will decrease, eventually entering collapse phase. I would anticipate that in 75 years you will see a dramatically different population gradient: an older world, likely even more urbanized, with vast stretches of the planet largely abandoned. Those residual populations will die off, with no migration influx; locations such as East Germany. You see these alarming fecundity rates (5.5) in places like Uganda, but there are so few Ugandans (44 million) compared with Indians (over one billion) that it will not have an appreciable impact. Plus, the untreated HIV infections will tend to hit the population numbers. Planet urbanization has other implications, including issues of income inequality and quality of life, so it will be an interesting future. Then again, I will be dead, so not to be around to watch it unfold. Oh, well.
  14. 1 point
    Solar on domestic roof spaces does not need any transmission lines because the power is either used by the house itself or within the local grid. The 'my solar panels in London are boiling someones kettle in Scotland' analogy is a myth. Household batteries are stationary so you don't need to opt for expensive high denisity Lithium Ion types. As the first generation of EV's require battery replacement the old batteries will make excellent household storage batteries with decades of life left in them.
  15. 1 point
    If the US automobile industry can make 17 million cars a year, how hard is it to make enough batteries to power 130 million US houses? The transmission capacity already exists. Overall power consumption isn't likely to change much, it's simply a matter of where it's generated.
  16. 1 point
    If society was serious about problem solving with the best bang for the buck, population management would have to be at the top of the list. No tax incentives for having children. Tax incentives for having no children. Stop international food trade if non compliant for example. If in 100 years the world population was cut in half, wouldn’t that be a positive?
  17. 1 point
    If society were serious about reducing or removing carbon-based fuels from transportation, and I don't think it is, then it would be proceeding along the lines of "most bang for the buck." And that is not happening. Society's efforts seem to revolve around providing fancy electric (battery) power packs for individual cars, buses and trucks. that strikes me as both inefficient and a mis-allocation of societal capital. Admittedly, it allows the unit builders to make some money, where they have successfully priced their product (both the Chevy Volt and the Tesla 3 do not make the cut), but other than that, it is a poor job, so far. How could society organize itself to get better returns on invested societal capital? First. let's remember that the typical IC engine is spending most of its life just loafing along. Your typical auto requires a mere 25 hp to roll along, if it is not accelerating or climbing a hill. Thus, to exploit that, every place where the road today has to go over the top of some mountain, you build a tunnel, in order to maintain a road gradient of no more than 0.9%. At that grade, your auto or truck does not have to drop out of top gear, and you are not interrupting the low fuels flow into that engine. I have calculated that some 40% of fuel on the 194-mile run from Baltimore to Morgantown West Virginia is consumed over only 30,000 feet or roadway. Why? That is where the trucks have to grind up the steep grades of the Cumberland with the fuel just gushing through the lines. For the USA, if you take the 100 highest-traffic mountain grades and drill tunnels instead, the liquid fuels consumption of the USA should drop down some 30%. That is huge. Tunnels today are built with giant tunnel-boring machines, which drill the hole and install the concrete shield in one operation. Figure one billion dollars for each tunnel: for $100 billion, you are permanently off oil by a drop of 30%. The next societal step is to run electrified wire above one lane-way: the designated truck lane (typically, the right-hand lane). Each heavy truck has one axle set up with an electric drive motor, and you can keep the diesel hooked up to the other drive axle. When you are running underneath the wire, the driver engages the trolley pantagraph and the diesel shuts down; that truck now is just as electric as the Tesla Truck, except there is no need for a gigantic battery (which is the big stumbling block, and expense). The truck is running off hydropower which is plenty cheap enough. Your fuel use goes way down, societally speaking. Now to get fancy, the USA would electrify the western railroads. The payoff here, setting aside the fuel savings, is that the catenary wires themselves can bring excess electricity to the urban areas from wind farms and whatever out in the plains. But somebody has to pay for those wires, and since in the USA the RRs are private, then it is on their nickel, and the capital needed is placed by management into other parts of the RR instead. Do all of the above, and where does your liquid fuels use end up? Whatever it is, it would be a huge drop. Lots of bang for the bucks, as they say in Yankeeland.
  18. 1 point
    Add the cost of transmission lines, batteries and simply the massive amount of work involved working towards scale and you will see decades of incremental gain.
  19. 1 point
    no doubt that SOME GUY would have been wrong....... THAT SAME TYPE OF "SOME GUY" in 2019 is sure the world is coming to an end due to alleged global warming........ ... and his girlfriend AOC says the world will end in 12 years because of it....... ps: came across this today... excellent video.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5sGtj7QKQ
  20. 1 point
    Tom, I would tend to agree. Depends on which index they are saying will top $70. I will say as a long time industry worker I have missed catastrophically (for my own finances), more then once. I have also nailed it a few times. Bought back into O&G stocks the week after Christmas and the first week of Jan, I also said in Jan of 2015 oil would go t0 $25 before we would recover, told that to Robert Rapier at a conference in Denver in 2015 and he laughed at me and explained all the reasons I was wrong and the drivers were not there to cause it to go below $35. My argument was, it is not the drivers, it is the investor and industry sentiment and emotions that will get it there. All said, this qualifies me to make an educated guess just like before. WTI does not have the drivers to get there, simply too much oil in that index already and with the SCOOP/STACK ramping up with Exxon/XTO active in the south and others active in the north we will see significant new finds driving inventory higher. There is no market for the light WTI crude that now dominates that index. And, investors are not heavily touting oil and gas. O&G producers are laying off people in relatively good economic times DVN, ECA/NFX and most likely CHK with their recent acquisition. O&G is already cutting rig counts in most basins. So the investors nor the producers are passionate about finding more oil. Emotions are the drivers that hits those peaks. One thing that could help but I think Trump is keeping a lid on is the stopping the heavy crude from Venz. It does not appear he is willing to curtail it. There are good reasons to put a heavy sanction in place and shut it down, it would end Maduro quickly, but Trump understands that USA refineries have to have a good supply of heavy crude or their outputs are severely curtailed using WTI light. We are not designed to refine light crude and cannot 'flip a switch' to go to full gear light gravity processing. If he curtailed Venz crude, the Saudis would have us by the short hairs and price would jump by dollars overnight. Saudis are not going to work with Trump after he let Iran go almost unchecked so he is powerless. The big driver is Saudi/OPEC and they have said over and over they want $65 - $75 oil so don't expect them to keep the foot on the brakes too much longer. So at $65 to $75 OPEC, that looks a lot like today! We got about $5 to $10. Hmmm... okay if they are talking $70 OPEC or Brent, yep it is 'right around the corner'. WTI, good luck all, convince the management as stockholders to quit drilling so many shale wells and you will get there. If you hold Valero and Holly ownership get them to build new refineries, for WTI oil but that won't happen for 5 to 10 years and by then aoc will have us in the new green deal (more like the socialist mode) and you will be a lot more worried about surviving then oil prices. Sorry I digressed. New refineries aren't happening unless we get about 8 to 12 more years of conservative, deregulating of EPA and permitting laws. We may see a binge of micro refineries to avoid those painful processes and that would help the light crude situation but again, not 'just around the corner'!!!
  21. 1 point
  22. 1 point
    Maybe there's still time to rectify the matter. Or are there people in authority questioning the accuracy of such forecasts? Me, I'd rather err on the side of caution.
  23. 1 point
    Amin Nassar is actually, IMHO, one of the good ones. California fossil fuel consumption is actually up. With emission regulations the air in LA is actually usually pretty good now. Can't say that about the KSA's air though. Ah, that addiction to suburbia and car. You know I am a fan of not all the eggs in one basket, renewables absolutely are a part of the equation, but oil, like coal, is going to be in use for a very, very, very, long time. Not in geological time terms, but in human lifetimes. Oil stores BTUs wonderfully. The KSA needs to get on serious solar bandwagon. Not so much for the carbon issue, but to offset the oil they burn for electricity that they could sell instead.
  24. 1 point
    Worked well in Venezuela. What could go wrong?
  25. 1 point
    I'd agree with Illurion. This is about boosting the New Mexico gov, or might be if I could work out just what the writer was saying. The lead post is not well expressed. Bluewill also seems convinced of the inevitable win of EVs over combustion engine when, as Illurion also notes, EVs still have major problems to sort out.
  26. 1 point
    This was seen coming in 2012 (I'm a dual Citizen). I'm amazed that a proportion of the Coal Seam Gas in Queensland was not designated for Australian usage with some additional support for pipelines down the east coast
  27. 1 point
    That is not how capacity factor is calculated. For a 1MW turbine at 100% capacity factor this would mean 8760 MWH of output per year. If for 2018 that turbine produces 4380 MWH then the capacity factor is 50% This can be scaled up to farms, groups of farms or an entire countries output from its collective fleet.It can also be used to compare year to year viability. Its also a measure of the reliability of the turbine as downtime equals lower CF. You can look at other parameters such as availability factors - the percentage of time the turbine is available to generate or the operational time which is the percentage of time the turbine is operating. This is often confused with capacity factor and its incorrectly assumed that a CF of 33% means the turbine is not operating for 67% of the time.
  28. 1 point
    He meant it as a compliment but it does sound stupid and it's also inaccurate. Shale drillers drill even when there's too much in storage. That's because they can't very well stop drilling and wait out the price slump. Unless those that go bankrupt, of course.
  29. 1 point
    Sorry to disappoint you Tom, but I happen to agree with Douglas about the population growth exceeding the carrying capacity of our planet. Phosphorus is also a limiting factor for our food supply. Urine is a rich source of phosphorus and we need to stop wasting it. Morocco has most of the readily mineable phosphate on our planet. Education of women leads to falling birth rates. My eight great grandparents have only two great grandchildren to carry on their genes. My family tradition is to value education, marry late, and have few offspring. Phosphate in Western Sahara: The Desert Rock That Feeds the World ... https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-desert-rock.../508853/ Nov 29, 2016 - Western Sahara has been occupied by Morocco, just north along the coast, since 1975. If you include this disputed region, Morocco holds more than 72 percent of all phosphate-rock reserves in the world, according to the most recent United States Geological Survey study.
  30. 1 point
    https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/turbines/haliade-x-offshore-turbine GE is claiming they can get their CE up to 63% with their 12 Mw turbine.
  31. 1 point
    Fact: Most of Europe is merely Ok at best for wind to POOR. UK/Ireland is an exception along with parts of Denmark. The rest will always have mediocre/poor capacity factor. It is even worse during the summer in Europe. This is partially balanced by they get... "some" sun in Europe in the summer at least. They are running out of Coal fast. Here: https://globalwindatlas.info/area/United States of America Scroll over to Europe. Its ok 1) Set to 100m hub height(no one is there yet) 2) turn on surface roughness index Notice how almost all of humanity lives nowhere near areas able to generate wind energy. Different topic: Capacity factor in USA averages just over 40% CF in Europe averages just over 32% CF in China averages just over 20% Now, how much of that power is actually USED instead of wasted(coal plants still burning) is anyone guess really. Areas of the world able to do wind energy: USA, Australia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, UK, Western Sahara, and Argentina. Everyone else is SCREWED. Oh, yea, the giant population of Greenland will be doing ok... It comes down to energy storage. 100%
  32. 1 point
    "And in sin my mother conceived me." ["Amen."] Now, that set me to thinking. Perhaps 30 years ago a quite smart woman offered me $5,000 to get her pregnant the old-fashioned way. What to do? Do I say "Amen" and go for it? Do I turn her down - and break her heart? This was a (married) woman who nonetheless wanted a child - specifically, with me as the sire. OK, so I am just a breeding horse. But I ask you: is having a Contract a mere plebian matter, taking it all out of "sin"? And if so, "is my sin better than your sins"? Life's little moments, to be sure. Oh, well.
  33. 1 point
    I am emphatically not "back." Just having a slow day and looking over the Forum. I devote my time to helping the unfortunate, the poor, and the dispossessed. At my age, I consider that a worthwhile project. Or series of projects.
  34. 1 point
    While this is all true to some extent the vital bit missing is that the installation listed are too small to make much difference in the short term. Remember that effective capacity for wind is only one third or so of its installed capacity. Also bear in mind that those countries have been building turbines for years and so far wind supplies about 14 per cent of energy in Europe (see article cited in lead post). Sure Germany wants to reduce its dependence on coal but all that's done is put the people who run the grid in a bind. They can't shut down the brown coal plants that the country mainly uses whenever the wind decides to blow so they have to dump electricity on Poland and the Czech republic. Then they claim they are mainly exporting the brown coal power and using the wind power in Germany. The craze for wind energy is having some truly absurd results.
  35. 1 point
    Either the world is going to end or it isn't. Which is it? Mankind has been dealing with climate change forever, and will deal with it forever. Anyone that says they know the future is the same as any other crackpot declaring "The end is near". Heeeerrre's your sign. As the man in the article says, this movement into government regulation by law is undemocratic; it is dictatorship. It is dictatorship by people who think they know where the world is going to be in 100 years. Absolute crap.
  36. 1 point
    Interesting stories Janet but one of the first cities to go would be Washington D.C. I am sure that these floodings have been going on for centuries and are related to King Tides and storm surges. Venice, Italy is a very old city and has been flooding for many decades. St. Augustine Florida has a large sea wall at the Fort there. It shows no apparent change in water level. I will be concerned when the elites stop building on the coasts and start moving to higher ground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_tide
  37. 1 point
    Janet, look where this base is built. Of course, it will have water damage due to storm surges. Do not confuse storm surges with ocean rise. Global warmists are always talking about weather events and blaming them on global warming while they simultaneously roundly condemn their opponents for doing the same thing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_surge
  38. 1 point
    There is no telling how much fossil fuel there is left. There is no shortage, yet we have been told one is imminent since Jimmy Carter reduced the speed limit to 55 mpg. This does not mean that renewables are not a great idea. They just need to mature and be improved to become more cost competitive. They should not be force fed to people who do not want them. I will like an electric car when it is a better deal than an ICE vehicle. I won't live that long though. Meanwhile, I will remain a proponent of natural gas as the preferred fuel for just about every use.
  39. 1 point
    Fascinating.. Using your own words.. HOW CAN SOMETHING THAT YOU SAY DOES NOT EXIST, SOMETHING THAT IS "FALLACIOUS", BE "EXPLAINED MANY TIMES ?" HOW DO YOU "EXPLAIN", "NOTHING." ?
  40. 1 point
  41. 1 point
    See... You have admitted you have lost by resorting to playing with words... I do not need to DEFEND anything. I do not have to SHOW anything. The Scientist was quite coherent in what he said. The video, with his own words, is filled with FACTUAL DATA and charts... But, of course, FACTS mean nothing to you.... especially facts that point out the errors in your belief system... I suppose now you will make some "witty" phrase or use some "silly symbol" to insult me as you take your ball and go home...
  42. 1 point
    Silly you. The IPCC gentleman is an actual Scientist. I will take his word over yours anytime. He is also backed up by all of the other well known facts about the affect of the SUN on the Earth.
  43. 1 point
    And in totally unrelated news: SURPRISE!! Panera’s Socialist Restaurant Closes Due to People Not Paying for Their Food Panera Bread cares, don’t you know? And by “cares,” I mean it lets people have stuff for free. ... Donald Trump handed socialism its behind last night, to the dismay of Bernie Sanders; but Panera Bread was sure the economic system was the bees knees. Therefore, it created Panera Cares. The cool and different restaurant’s MO? It offered food at a “suggested donation” price. Doesn’t that sound nice? ... Now here’s a shock to us all: Panera Cares’ll be officially closing on February 15th. As it turns out, when you don’t make people pay for stuff, people don’t pay for stuff. Though there’s no “I” in “team,” there’s a big one in “Incentive,” ...
  44. 1 point
    I didn't mean to imply it was due to the windmills not working; just no wind.
  45. 1 point
    Red - again, sorry but you've got your story quite twisted. Its not so much that the change is contrary to AGW theory but whether current change is natural or due to some form of human action. Of course the AGW models can be poked and prodded to simulate current climate conditions (the medieval warming period is considered natural, the argument is about the last few decades). Even then the real argument is about whether climate models can be used to forecast anything useful or whether they are a waste of time.. A related argument is whether current warming is an any way exceptional or different. leave it with you..
  46. 1 point
    Red, I am trained as a physicist. When I look at the inputs, what Man does is dwarfed by what Nature does. I really have no enthusiasm for getting into it with you, and I shall not, but suffice it to say that a trace gas, measured in parts per million for heaven's sake, is not going to suffocate the planet. Meanwhile, be happy it is warm. the long-term trend for the planet is global cooling, on a massive scale. The place will end up as the Ice Planet Hoth soon enough. Incidentally, for you lurker readers out there, all these pronouncements about melting ice sheets in Greenland making the sea rise up by 75 feet (or whatever) is not assured, notwithstanding the stentorian pronouncements. The reason is that melted ice does not end up as more seawater. You get these warmer waters that are sucked up into the atmosphere by evaporation, that then goes with the moving air mass over the ocean until it hits land, and depending on where that is, it comes out as rain over ancient legacy aquifers, which end up getting recharged by the excess rainwater. Lots of aquifers have been pumped down, and they await more rain to go capture. It might surprise readers to be told that Saudi Arabia once supported six large rivers, with the land surface a lush savanna. Same with most of North Africa. There are glacial legacy aquifer lakes underneath the Sahara that hold almost as much water as the US Great Lakes! There is so much water down there that in spots it comes right up to the surface and creates these oases. And the current levels of those aquifers is way, way down; they can easily absorb all the water of the Greenland ice sheet and then some. The scientists led by Hansen and his alarmisms do not account for any of that. The suggestion that melting ice causes global wobble is rubbish. The wobble comes from uneven mass distribution in the earth's crust, generated largely by shifting tectonic plates. The real biggie is the Indian Ocean plate, were India is pushing Northward and digging out this huge trench behind it. the mass removed is pushed into the Asian Plate and has formed the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. The mass removal from the seafloor is so incredible that if you were to draw a "Great Circle" at sea surface over the South Atlantic and extend it over the Indian Ocean, you could drop a plumbline from that Circle line to the ocean surface in the Indian Ocean south of India and the distance would be about 187 feet! The reason is the absence of mass reduces the gravitational pull, and the water is pulled by the greater masses elsewhere, with more gravitational pull. These are the tidbits that the AGW scientists elect to ignore.
  47. 1 point
    Does anyone ever wonder why Greenland was named Green Land? It is because it was much more green at that time. Climate has always changed and some just refuse to admit it. So called scientists are the best example. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian Florida mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian_Stage The last great flood. Sea level at peak was probably 4 to 6m (13 to 20 feet) higher than today (references in Overpeck et al., 2006), with much of this extra water coming from Greenland but some likely to have come from Antarctica. See: Global Warming AKA Climate Change https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vHU2hHXebxpvExT7srNNnX-VM7Qn9Ak_ZmdKCIcUti8/edit
  48. 1 point
    You can check the Russian fuels prices by region here : https://fuelprices.ru/en/ You'll see the cheapest fuel is in central Russia (Siberia and Urals) where oil producing regions are located. Super95 is currently between 42 ₽ in Tomsk and 58 ₽ in the very cold and isolated northern far east town Anadyr (the rouble is at 0.015 $)
  49. 1 point
    In Europe you'll find the lowest price in Russia (0.6 Euro/liter of Super95 = $3 /gallon) and the highest in Norway (1.71 Euro/liter = $8.5 / gallon) Super95 is the most common type of fuel in Europe and the average price is at 1.27 Euro/liter = $6.35 / gallon The main reason of this wide spectrum is the level of taxation very different from one country to another. Price at the middle of November by country : Country Super 95 Premium 98 Diesel Albania 1.44 EUR 1.44 EUR Andorra 1.19 EUR 1.25 EUR 1.04 EUR Armenia 0.86 EUR 0.89 EUR 0.84 EUR Austria 1.32 EUR 1.47 EUR 1.32 EUR Azerbaijan 0.78 EUR 0.83 EUR 0.31 EUR Belarus 0.63 EUR 0.68 EUR 0.63 EUR Belgium 1.44 EUR 1.52 EUR 1.61 EUR Bosnia and Herzegovina 1.21 EUR 1.26 EUR 1.21 EUR Bulgaria 1.10 EUR 1.30 EUR 1.22 EUR Croatia 1.29 EUR 1.37 EUR 1.34 EUR Cyprus 1.29 EUR 1.35 EUR 1.38 EUR Czech Republic 1.24 EUR 1.27 EUR 1.26 EUR Denmark 1.45 EUR 1.53 EUR 1.35 EUR Estonia 1.34 EUR 1.39 EUR 1.38 EUR Finland 1.52 EUR 1.60 EUR 1.50 EUR France 1.47 EUR 1.54 EUR 1.48 EUR Georgia 0.85 EUR 0.89 EUR 0.87 EUR Germany 1.47 EUR 1.70 EUR 1.36 EUR Great Britain 1.41 EUR 1.45 EUR 1.51 EUR Greece 1.59 EUR 1.75 EUR 1.45 EUR Hungary 1.17 EUR 1.21 EUR 1.32 EUR Iceland 1.61 EUR 1.61 EUR Ireland 1.50 EUR 1.43 EUR Italy 1.61 EUR 1.79 EUR 1.53 EUR Latvia 1.29 EUR 1.34 EUR 1.28 EUR Lithuania 1.16 EUR 1.24 EUR 1.16 EUR Luxembourg 1.18 EUR 1.25 EUR 1.15 EUR Macedonia 1.09 EUR 1.12 EUR 1.05 EUR Malta 1.36 EUR 1.51 EUR 1.23 EUR Moldova 0.97 EUR 1.01 EUR 0.86 EUR Montenegro 1.33 EUR 1.37 EUR 1.31 EUR Netherlands 1.66 EUR 1.73 EUR 1.46 EUR Norway 1.71 EUR 1.81 EUR 1.68 EUR Poland 1.17 EUR 1.23 EUR 1.23 EUR Portugal 1.59 EUR 1.71 EUR 1.45 EUR Romania 1.12 EUR 1.19 EUR 1.21 EUR Russia 0.60 EUR 0.70 EUR 0.63 EUR Serbia 1.30 EUR 1.39 EUR 1.42 EUR Slovakia 1.44 EUR 1.65 EUR 1.29 EUR Slovenia 1.32 EUR 1.45 EUR 1.36 EUR Spain 1.28 EUR 1.41 EUR 1.23 EUR Sweden 1.43 EUR 1.49 EUR 1.55 EUR Switzerland 1.47 EUR 1.47 EUR 1.60 EUR Turkey 1.05 EUR 1.06 EUR 1.04 EUR Ukraine 1.01 EUR 1.04 EUR 1.00 EUR
  50. 1 point
    Here in Californiagrad, new taxes have been collected for road repairs. We have seven refineries. Perhaps the new funds are hoarded to pay lawsuits when 5 year old cracked pavement throws passengers out of windows seats, safety belts and all? I believe chairman Brown wants 200% alcohol at the pump, regular unleaded in the scotch and higher taxes on marijuana. Our Costco gasoline is one dollar per gallon costlier than what this article headlines. If Sacramento had their way, government executives would be furnished with Muskmobiles with free fill-ups and Zil Lanes. Disgusting. The poor get poorer -- much poorer in this misguided utopia. I should know I live on Social Security.