u.s. forsees a thinner cushion of coal

WSJ | Every year, federal employee George Warholic calculates America's vast coal reserves the same way his predecessors have for decades: He looks up the prior year's coal-reserve estimate, subtracts the year's nationwide production and arrives at a new official tally.

Coal provides nearly one-quarter of the total energy consumed in the U.S., and by Mr. Warholic's estimate, the country has enough in the ground to last about 240 years. A belief in this nearly boundless supply has led officials to dub the U.S. the "Saudi Arabia of Coal." But the estimate, recent findings show, may be wildly overconfident.

While there is almost certainly as much coal in the ground as Mr. Warholic's Energy Information Administration believes, relatively little of it can be profitably extracted. Last year, the U.S. Geological Survey completed an extensive analysis of Wyoming's Gillette coal field, the nation's largest and most productive, and determined that less than 6% of the coal in its biggest beds could be mined profitably, even at prices higher than today's.

"We really can't say we're the Saudi Arabia of coal anymore," says Brenda Pierce, head of the USGS team that conducted the study.

No one says the U.S. is facing a coal shortage. But the emerging ranks of "peak coal" theorists argue that current production levels may be unsustainable and, if anything, create a false sense of security. David Rutledge, an electrical-engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology who has studied global coal production, figures the U.S. has about half as much recoverable reserves as the government says, which would work out to about 120 years' worth.

The Energy Information Administration, part of the Department of Energy, says it is reassessing its coal tally in light of the new Geological Survey data. It intends to create a new coal baseline from which it will begin its annual subtraction "as soon as we can," says William Watson, a member of the energy analysis team at EIA in Washington, D.C.

In the field, challenges are becoming more apparent. Mining companies report they have to dig deeper and move more earth to extract coal from aging mines, driving up costs.

Utilities have grown skittish about whether suppliers can ship promised coal on time. American Electric Power Co., the nation's biggest coal buyer, says it has stepped up its due diligence to make sure its suppliers can make deliveries after some firms missed shipments last fall. It even bought a mine to lock down supplies. "We are very much concerned, and it's getting worse," said Tim Light, senior vice president for AEP.

(Accompanying slide show is amazing. Check it out.)

arming up

The Economist | The world's biggest military spenders by population - GLOBAL military expenditure rose by 4% in 2008 to a record $1.46 trillion, according to a new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israel spends most on defence relative to its population, shelling out over $2,300 a person, over $300 more than America. Small and rich countries, and notably Gulf states, feature prominently by this measure. Saudi Arabia ranks ninth in absolute spending, but sixth by population. China has increased spending by 10% to $85 billion to become the world's second largest spender. But it is still dwarfed by America, whose outlay of $607 billion is higher than that of the next 14 biggest spenders combined.

team aggression

FORA.tv | Why is it that humans, nearly unique in this regard, have a natural inclination to band together and kill off members of our own species? The fact that chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives, are the only other animals known to exhibit such organized warlike behavior is a big clue.

Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, authors of the new book Sex and War, assert that the answers lie in our biological history -- that aggression against our own species is rooted in deep evolutionary impulses and predispositions. In other words, intra-species battling among our protohuman ancestors gave a reproductive advantage to the most violent males -- and here we are, their pugnacious descendants, still at it.

Watch to learn how sex and war are inextricably linked, and perhaps, what we modern-day humans can do about it.

sex and war?

The Scientist | War has most often been studied by social scientists -- anthropologists embedding themselves with hunter-gatherer tribes, archaeologists teasing evidence of past epochs of war and peace from the ground, and psychologists and sociologists poking and prodding the minds of warriors and others. But one question often goes unasked: Why war? Why do we humans, almost alone among the animals, band together and intentionally kill members of our own species?

That is a question only biology can answer -- and as Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, "nothing in biology makes sense but in the light of evolution." Humans, of course, are descended from a long line of ape ancestors, including a common ancestor with chimpanzees some five to seven million years ago. As Jane Goodall, Richard Wrangham and others have shown, we also share with chimps the bizarre propensity to attack and kill others of our own species. And evolution explains why.

I haven't read it, so the answer is that I don't know. Being a student of pernicious killer-ape tendencies, my interest is piqued. However, one thing I know for certain, is that it's being propagandistically marketed. Note the second part of the full title; Timely Book Puts Finger On Terrorist Attacks in the Gaza and Elsewhere. Chances are that there's a profoundly unscientific agenda undergirding this presentation of yet another killer-ape hypothesis.

europe swings right as depression deepens

Telegraph | The establisment Left had been crushed across most of Europe, just as it was in the early 1930s.

We have seen the ultimate crisis of capitalism -- what Marxist-historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the "dramatic equivalent of the collapse of the Soviet Union" -- yet socialists have completely failed to reap any gain from the seeming vindication of their views.

It is not clear why a chunk of the blue-collar working base has swung almost overnight from Left to Right, but clearly we are seeing the delayed detonation of two political time-bombs: rising unemployment and the growth of immigrant enclaves that resist assimilation.

Note that Right-wing incumbents in France (Sarkozy) and Italy (Berlusconi), survived the European elections unscathed.

Left-wing incumbents in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, and of course Britain were either slaughtered, or badly mauled.

international energy outlook 2009

EIA | The International Energy Outlook 2009 (IEO2009) presents an assessment by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the outlook for international energy markets through 2030. U.S. projections appearing in IEO2009 are consistent with those published in EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2009 (AEO2009), (March 2009). A revised, updated AEO2009 reference case projection was released on April 17, 2009. It reflects the impact of provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA2009), enacted in mid-February 2009, on U.S. energy markets. The revised AEO2009 reference case includes updates for the U.S. macroeconomic outlook, which has been changing at an unusually rapid rate in recent months. Throughout IEO2009, significant changes to the U.S. outlook relative to the published AEO2009 reference case are noted for the reader’s reference. The complete revised AEO2009 reference case results for the United States can be viewed on the EIA web site:

uganda's oil reserves rival saudi arabia’s

Busiweek | Uganda's oil reserves could be as much as that of the Gulf countries, a senior official at the US Department of Energy has said.
Based on the test flow results encountered at the wells so far drilled and other oil numbers, Ms. Sally Kornfeld, a senior analyst in the office of fossil energy went ahead to talk about Uganda's oil reservoirs in the same sentence as Saudi Arabia.

"You are blessed with amazing reservoirs. Your reservoirs are incredible. I am amazed by what I have seen, you might rival Saudi Arabia," Kornfeld told a visiting delegation from Uganda in Washington DC.

The group of Ugandans was in Washington on an international visitor programme and looked at the efficient use of natural energy resources.

The group comprised Ministry of Energy officials, a Member of Parliament, members from the civil society and one journalist.

At present, Uganda has four oil prospectors on the ground including Heritage Oil, Tullow Oil, Tower Oil and Dominion Oil.

oprah winfrey's medical misinformation complex

Newsweek | Yesterday, the latest issue of NEWSWEEK hit the stands, featuring Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert's smart, gutsy cover story on what one might call the Oprah Winfrey Medical Misinformation Complex, were one not so afraid of a lawsuit. Shorter version (though you should read the whole thing): Oprah, who has tremendous influence and credibility, promotes health "cures" that may be at best ineffective and at worst dangerous. Both media and medical bloggers took note of the story, and have been discussing its merits online. Some examples:

PZ Myers, a biologist, associate professor at the University of Minnesota and a blogger at ScienceBlogs was one of the first responders:

It's about time one of the big media players pointed out that she is promoting dangerous fake therapies…all with a happy smile, of course, and a message of positive self-esteem for women. It's still credulous glop, though.

The article really struck a nerve with Dr. Dave Gorski, a blogger at Science-Based Medicine (bookmark it: the site is a great source of thorough, critical reviews of both the latest research and medical fads). The first sentence quoted here can only be described as a "run-on of rage":

Oprah has about as close to no critical thinking skills when it comes to science and medicine as I’ve ever seen, and she uses the vast power and influence her TV show and media empire give her in order to subject the world to her special brand of mystical New Age thinking and belief in various forms of what can only be characterized as dubious medical therapies at best and quackery at worst.

No one, and I mean no one, brings pseudoscience, quackery, and antivaccine madness to more people than Oprah Winfrey does every week...Consequently, whether fair or unfair, she represents the perfect face to put on the problem that we supporters of science-based medicine face when trying to get the message out to the average reader about unscientific medical practices, and that’s why I am referring to the pervasiveness of pseudoscience infiltrating medicine as the “Oprah-fication” of medicine.

More scathingness at the Newsweek blog.

creative chemistry controlling our food

On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television - a documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic bio-tech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.

Fist tap Dale.

america in microcosm..,

NPR | Henry Ford didn't just want to be a maker of cars — he wanted to be a maker of men. He thought he could perfect society by building model factories and pristine villages to go with them. And he was pretty successful at it in Michigan. But in the jungles of Brazil, he would ultimately be defeated.

It was 1927. Ford wanted his own supply of rubber — and he decided to get it by carving a plantation and a miniature Midwest factory town out of the Amazon jungle. It was called "Fordlandia."

Ford didn't just want to tame men; he wanted to tame the jungle itself — and therein was his next failure.

"Ford basically tried to impose mass industrial production on the diversity of the jungle," Grandin says. But the Amazon is one of the most complex ecological systems in the world — and didn't fit into Ford's plan. "Nowhere was this more obvious and more acute than when it came to rubber production," Grandin says.

Ford was so distrustful of experts that he never even consulted one about rubber trees. If he had, Grandin says, he would have learned that plantation rubber can't be grown in the Amazon. "The pests and the fungi and the blight that feed off of rubber are native to the Amazon. Basically, when you put trees close together in the Amazon, what you in effect do is create an incubator — but Ford insisted."

The resulting plantation actually accelerated the production of caterpillars, leaf blight and other organisms that prey on rubber, Grandin says.

the economy is a battleground...,

Be sure to check out all three parts of this Herman Daly lecture. Then check out the transcript of his recent lecture at the United States Society for Ecological Economics bi-annual conference (at American University near Washington DC).

new attention on late-term abortions

Washington Post | When Susan Fitzgerald went in for a routine ultrasound near the end of her pregnancy, she was expecting good news. Instead, she was stunned to learn that the fetus had a rare condition that left his bones so brittle he would live less than a day.

"It was unbelievable," Fitzgerald said. "You think by the third trimester you're home free. It was devastating."

Desperate to end the pregnancy, she flew from her home in New England to Wichita, where George Tiller was one of the few doctors in the country willing to perform an abortion so late in a pregnancy.

"It was very difficult, but I knew it was the most humane thing I could do for my baby," Fitzgerald said. "It was absolutely the right thing to do. I'm just so grateful that Dr. Tiller was there for me."

Her story is one of dozens that have surfaced in the past week during candlelight vigils, at memorials and on blog postings since the shooting death of Tiller. An antiabortion activist has been charged in his slaying.

Tiller's death has focused attention on abortions late in pregnancy. While it is clear that they account for a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million U.S. abortions each year, much about the procedures is unclear, including exactly how many are done, by whom and under what circumstances. The government does not collect detailed data, and doctors who perform them publish little information.

"What made Dr. Tiller unusual was that he specialized in seeing women who found out late in very wanted pregnancies that they were carrying fetuses with anomalies that were incompatible with life," Saporta said. "For them, there was really no good choice. They needed to terminate their pregnancies to protect their own health, and he provided both the emotional and physical care for women in that situation."

Abortion opponents condemn the procedures, regardless of the circumstances.

irresponsible narcissism's exemplar...,

priceless....,

IEA lies...,

Platts | The latest peak oil projection: a stunning difference

A session with a leading Peak Oil supporter can always be a sobering experience. That was certainly the case May 28 at the "New Challenges for Crude Oil" conference in Geneva, where the president of main international Peak Oil group spoke.

Swedish professor Kjell Aleklett is actually a physics professor at Uppsale Universit, not a geology professor. But he is also the president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, and he was chair of the Platts' conference.

He is about to present a paper for peer review and inclusion in the academic magazine Energy Policy. That paper will take issue with the International Energy Agency projections on oil supply out to 2030, by an enormous factor.

The difference between the IEA and Aleklett's work is fairly straightforward. Aleklett adopts what he calls a "parameter" in determing the rate of depletion in fields that have yet to be developed or fields yet to be discovered, two key elements in the IEA's projections.

The gap between his work and that of the IEA is huge. IEA projections of liquids supply see total output of 101.5 million b/d by 2030. Aleklett's research sees it at a little more than 75 million b/d.

There are numerous areas where Aleklett said his research agreed with the IEA, including the projected rate of decline of existing fields. But beyond that, what Aleklett says are the different approaches toward depletion rates creates enormous differences in projections out to 2030. Output in fields to be developed would be 22.5 million b/d in the IEA forecast; it's 13.6 in Aleklett's. The difference in fields yet to be discovered is 19.2 million b/d vs. 8.7 million b/d.

Aleklett, like other Peak Oil proponents, also criticized the IEA practice of counting all barrels of NGLs equally with a barrel of crude, even though the BTU content is not equal.

Aleklett's conclusions also hinted at a politically-driven agenda at IEA. He said the agency often takes the approach of "you should rely on us because we are telling you the truth, and governments around the world trust the IEA." The IEA's forecast on the rate of depletion is "outside reality."

IEA forecasts are "demand-driven," he said, assuming that if global economic growth averages 3%, "that is driving production." "They're giving oil supply estimates to support GDP esimtates," he said. "They are not allowed to give oil that does not show an increase in GDP in the future."

current events

Princeton | In a few years, there will be an abundance of non-geological explanations for peak oil: OPEC cut back production to support the price. Investment in new oil sources was interrupted by the drop in the oil price. The Hubbert prediction did not involve the minutiae of the oil markets. It could well be that the oil-supply tail is wagging the world economic dog.

One of the available data sources is the Baker-Hughes count of the number of drilling rigs actively digging for oil or natural gas. The Hughes rig count dates back to 1944, when salesmen from Hughes Tool Company went to the active rigs to sell drill bits. Here are some recent counts for North America:

September 12, 2008 - 2031 rigs running

May 22, 2009 - 900 rigs running

The rig count was cut in half in 8 months. That's not the "drill, baby, drill" chant from the Republican National Convention.

A speculative news story says that the major international oil companies are eager to re-enter the oil business in Iraq. I have been in denial for 5 years, not wanting to admit that the principle reason for the Iraq War was getting the major oil companies back in business. But there they are, lining up, even before there is internal legislation in Iraq dividing up oil responsibilities and before the American Army pulls out. (No one is going to like my idea for staffing the residual US "advisory" force in Iraq. I would limit it to volunteer officers; no enlisted men at risk.)

terrorism's tragic toll...,

fist tap to Submariner MD.

the cross-hairs of american extremism

Washington Post | GEORGE TILLER knew the danger of providing late-term abortions. His home was picketed, his office was blown up and in 1993 he was shot in both arms by an anti-abortion zealot. He never considered stopping his work, because he knew there were women who needed his help. His murder is a tragedy for his family, his patients and his profession. It should serve as a wake-up call that more must be done to ensure that women have access to this legal procedure.

Mr. Tiller was shot to death Sunday as he handed out bulletins in his Kansas church and as his wife sang in the choir. Yesterday, authorities charged Scott Roeder with first-degree murder, and they are investigating what have been described as his virulent anti-abortion views. Mr. Tiller is the fourth abortion provider to be killed since 1993; the attacks he and his Wichita clinic endured are not isolated events. The National Abortion Federation has catalogued 6,143 such incidents of violence in the United States and Canada between 1977 and 2009, including arson, bombings and butyric acid attacks.

It is unclear how this violence has affected decisions by health-care providers. What is known is that the number of places where women can go for abortions has been declining since 1982. About one-third of women live in a county with no abortion providers, reports the Guttmacher Institute, and as a result a growing number of women have difficulty receiving the services in a timely manner.

The vast majority of abortions are performed in free-standing clinics like that run by Mr. Tiller. Very few are performed in hospitals -- a sign that mainline medicine is not living up to its responsibility. What has been overlooked since Mr. Tiller's appalling murder is what will happen to women who need his services. Mr. Tiller was one of the few doctors who performed abortions in the third trimester, and the stories of these women are heartbreaking because, in large measure, they desperately wanted children but were dealing with something gone horribly awry in their pregnancies.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is offering U.S. Marshals Service protection for abortion clinics and the doctors who staff them. It's the right call, but one that underscores the urgency of coming up with better solutions for the delivery of abortion services.

the logic of extremism

Time | Bloggers on the left have deplored "Christian fundamentalist terrorism" and accused "those wastes of humanity in the media like Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly" for helping to "create and stoke a climate of hate and intolerance toward those who believe in a woman's right to choose." Malkin, for her part, warned readers to "prepare for collective demonization of pro-lifers and Christians — and more gratuitous attempts to tar talk radio, Fox News and the Tea Party movement as responsible for the heinous crime." (Read "Vatican Newspaper: 'Obama Is Not a Pro-Abortion President.' ")

Dr. Tiller, like others before him, represented a challenge to both sides. Late-term abortions have always been the hardest to defend, but he and his supporters would point to cases when the procedure, however morally troubling, was medically necessary. Murder is even harder to defend, and yet there are some kinds of killing we distinguish from murder. A battlefield slaying is one; killing in self-defense is another. To its supporters, capital punishment is a third way, and now we approach the logical challenge. If someone truly believes that abortion is the same as murder, then is not bombing abortion clinics or killing the doctors comparable to bombing concentration camps or killing their commandants? I've heard pro-choice activists argue that even pro-lifers must view abortion as something less than murder, or else they would be taking more extreme action to stop it. At the very least, they'd be arguing that abortion should be not merely illegal but criminal and that the doctors and even the patients should face jail time.

The mainstream pro-life movement operates as protest groups usually do — within the law, by peaceful means, working for legislative change on the one hand and cultural change on the other. But there is an uncomfortable consistency in the logic of the extremists: If abortion providers are mass child killers and the law refuses to act, the vigilante may see himself as the lone defender of justice — as vigilantes usually do. Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who in 1991 was arrested while protesting in front of Tiller's office, released a statement that began, "Dr. Tiller was a mass murderer ... he left this life with his hands drenched with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of babies that he murdered. Surely there will be a dreadful accounting for what he has done."

While his statement calls for "vigorous (yet peaceful) actions," his logic leads elsewhere.

taking responsibility