The Center for American Progress: Experts aint what they used to be.

This article from the Center for American Progress caught my eye this morning. Its author, Daniel J. Weiss, is an “expert on climate strategy. He has gained this prestigious title mainly through his many years of experience as a PR hack for environmental groups. The article argues that we don’t need more exploration, focusing on offshore exploration, because we just wind up exporting all of it anyways,

More offshore drilling in the Gulf Coast region, however, may not do much to increase our energy security. A CAP analysis (.xls) of Energy Information Administration data found that a large portion of the oil produced in the Gulf Coast region is actually exported to other nations, and this undoubtedly includes some of the offshore oil produced there.

After looking into this, there are several problems with Weiss’s argument.

First, there is no data that directly states what oil drilled from what region is exported. Weiss admits this, but manages to weasel out of it.

But the main problem with his argument is that no clarification is given as to what exactly is being exported.

The “oil” we export is not in the form crude, but rather is composed of diesel and other heavy fractional petroleum distillates. When crude is refined into its final products, the ratio of what is produced out is fixed (for the most part). A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, out of which refiners can squeeze about 20 gallons of gasoline and about 10 gallons of diesel. Refiners have become pretty good at modifying their process to maximize the most marketable products, but the chemistry and thermodynamics of refining do have limits as to how much they can maximize the more profitable distillates. And since we use far more gasoline than diesel, refiners are always left with excess diesel.

Weiss’s data that he used for his “analysis” (if that’s what you’d call it) states quite clearly: Total Crude Oil and Petroleum Products. Had Weiss bothered to look at the footnotes in his link, he would have also found this:

Exports of distillate fuel oil categories for sulfur greater than 15 ppm to 500 ppm and sulfur greater than 500 ppm to 2000 ppm may include distillate fuel oil with sulfur content 15 ppm and under.

Had Weiss then done some more digging (I know, hard work for an “expert”) he would have come across this set of data, also from the Energy Information Administration, breaking down the subcategories for exports of “Total Crude Oil and Petroleum Products”.

Even more digging (once again, hard work for an “expert”) he would have seen that what little raw crude oil the US exports goes exclusively to Canada. To further put this into perspective, in 2009 we exported a whopping 15.9 million barrels to Canada, or 0.82% of total US domestic oil production.

This leaves us with three possible conclusion: Weiss isn’t the expert he claims to be because he dint know how to look deeper into the numbers or he deliberately mislead to make his case against additional oil production.

Either way, its just another reason not to take the Center for American Progress seriously. And, naturally, “climate expert” Joe Romm bought off on this POS as well.

Power in Venezuela

Recently, Venezuela’s socialist “man of the people” Hugo Chavez was giving a speech about the evils of capitalism when the lights went out, quite literally.



This is a appropriate metaphor for the oil rich country. Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution is destroying what should in all rights be prospering nation.

Chavez and his defenders (and he has many of them) blame the nation’s power problems on the El Nino drought that has nearly depleted the Guri reservoir, which supplies nearly 2/3rds of the nation’s electricity. They do have a point, the output of the Guri dam has been severely impacted by the drought, but that alone does not tell the whole story. Venezuela experienced similarly sever droughts in 1998 and had associated power blackouts, but nowhere near the extent of what is seen today.

Venezuela experienced 67 “significant power outages” during the drought of 1998, now they now experience that number every month.
Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia also generates about 2/3rds of its electricity from hydro and has been hit just a hard by El Nino but hasn’t faced similarly large power outages. Colombia has managed its power sector so well that they have even offered to sell Venezuela excess power.

Considering the record prices of oil the past ten years, one would assume that the Venezuelan government would have invested in non hydro power, like its Colombian neighbors. Well, you’d be mistaken.

In what is endemic of Venezuela’s crumbling power grid, Planta Centro a 2,000MW oil and gas fired plant is in such a state of disrepair that it is only operating at 273MW. For a country whose generating capacity is only 23,600MW, a 10% reduction in capacity is sorely missed at a time like this.

And if you think that this mismanagement and corruption only applies to Venezuela’s power sector, Stratfor has an interesting analysis on PDVSA’s production discrepancies:

that if the government’s assertion that Venezuela is producing 3.3 million bpd is truthful, oil exports should be averaging at least 2.8 million bpd after netting out some 500,000 bpd of internal consumption. Based on an official average export price of $39.33 per barrel during first quarter 2005, this means Venezuela’s oil export earnings during the first quarter should have totaled slightly more than $9.9 billion.

However, Energy and Mines Minister Rafael Ramirez, PDVSA’s president, recently said PDVSA deposited only $6.43 billion at the central bank. This leaves $2.39 billion in oil export earnings unaccounted for — if the government’s official production figures are truthful.

Whether its graft or mismanagement, Venezuela’s leadership is putting itself into a hole that it wont soon climb out of and is killing its golden goose in the process.

Obama and the Opposition

I have read many articles as of late bemoaning (or rejoicing) in Obama’s inability to pass legislation.

The standard response from the right is that Obama and Rham Emanuel (specifically brought in as a legislative enforcer) are incompetent and that their policies don’t reflect the real sentiment of the voters. This is true on some level. The health care reform legislation is very unpopular even if some aspects of it appeal to most voters and has turned toxic on the democratic party. America is a also center right nation.

The standard response from the left seems to be the Republicans are the Party of “no” and have banded together to squash Obama. The gravy for this charge seems is either the racially flavored (republicans don’t like black people) or populist (republicans are in the pockets of the corporations). As with the conservative explanation, this one has some, all be it less merit. Republicans have banded together in a fairly uniform block to oppose the president however I don’t believe its for the more nefarious reasons given above. Some of it is standard loyal opposition type stuff and some is ideological. Special interests dominate both parties and I am sure on some specific legislation it does play a factor.

I believe that Obama’s lack of executive experience coupled with the environment his political career was incubated in is more to blame: The Cook County Democratic machine

Ironically enough, this actually attracted some voters to Obama. They believed that experience operating within a big time political machine would some how “toughen” an inexperienced junior senator.

Take Charles Kaiser from the Hillman Foundation:

I always thought the fact that Obama was the product of the Chicago Democratic machine was one of the most appealing parts of his resume–because it made it plausible that this freshman Senator could be strong enough to become an effective president.

What Kaiser doesn’t realize is machine politics is more like a family unit: you may have disagreements and feuds, but at the end of the day everyone has a similar perspective on things and you all have the same agenda. Differences are always tactical and very seldom ideological. The machine runs everything in government and there really is no organized effective political opposition.

You maintain your place in the machine by bribing key demographics with cushy city jobs, nepotism, government contracts and generous concessions to allied unions. They in turn provide political muscle, votes, intimidation campaigns, and share in the machine’s plundering of the taxbase. Machines like this tend to operate in urban areas for reasons of demographics. The average white urbanite is a liberal who will always vote democrat no matter what. Minorities vote democrat because they have been successfully corralled in a different kind of plantation by their new overseers. Combine that with the union vote, government employees, dependants and no effective opposition and it gives you a recipe for perpetual one party domination.

This is the environment Obama acquired his skills as a political operator in. His much ballyhooed “bi-partisanship” consisted of cosponsoring some legislation with Tom Coburn. He has never had to operate in an environment where there was not only political opposition but ideological opposition. And unlike the democratic machine in cook county, the national democratic party has very striking ideological fissures in it. They aint all Nancy Pelosies and Henry Waxmans.

What about his time in the US Senate working with opposition there, surely he learned from his experience there? Not hardly, he was there for what, 6 months before he went into campaign mode?

His lack of experience in dealing with organized opposition explains his ineffectiveness. All his talk of bipartisanship is bullshit because he thought having a large majority in both houses would allow him to Rahm anything he wanted through.

Having operated in a bubble his whole life, Obama now founders when removed from his comfort zone.

The results of the 2010 midterms are going to be really interesting.

Filibustering democrats bad, Filibustering republicans good!

NPR's Daniel Schoor on why the filibuster is good:

With 55 Senate seats held by the GOP, that should be no problem. But apparently there is a problem. As demonstrated in the spirited fight in the Foreign Relations Committee over Mr. Bolton, the Democrats seem united; the Republicans do not. Senator Frist must be aware that opinion polls reflect a general lack of enthusiasm for abolishing the filibuster.

Daniel Schoor now:

On occasion the frustrated majority has threatened to invoke what is called the nuclear option: a change in Senate rules that would require only a simple majority to overcome a filibuster. And so why don't the Democrats do it? Why do they leave themselves at the mercy of a minority? Until now the majority has been reluctant to end a venerable practice that it may want when it becomes a minority. But now the stakes for the nation are too high. A single senator has too much power to obstruct. A handful of senators can bog down the whole legislative process. It is time to restore majority rule as intended by our Constitution

I wonder what accounted for his change in heart?

My favorite Climategate email so far

Just spent a few minutes skimming through the emails and this one caught my eye.

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , "Philip D. Jones" , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate

In laymen terms Trenberth is saying that since an unverified, unvalidated computer model has predicted more warming than has been observed empirically, the empirical observations (i.e. weather stations) must be wrong. .

Title this one: who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.

Climategate – a new spin on Mann made global warming

By now news of the data theft at Britain’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has is widespered. Thousands of emials and messages between the world’s preminent climate scientists have been made available and it doesn look good.

When I woke up and sat down with my morning bowl of cereal and read about all of this I thought it was a hoax … it just seemed to good to be true. I though for years that global warming advocates were scaring the shit out of people using questioable climate models nut I could have never imagined that they were intentionaly and systematiclay misrepresenting their data.

Its like something out of Michael Criton’s “State of Fear”.

This must have taken them by surprise because the damage control has been weak and hastily put together. A blog titled Real Climate, where many of the individuals discussed in the database congregate, has posted their best attempot at a response to this:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of
any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate
research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global
warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching
orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid
will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

There’s not much else of any substance in the response except to repeat that they did nothing wrong.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. The emails detail many disturbing behaviors including:

- collusion between the researchers to destroy and/or hide information subject to FOIA requests
- organized efforts to block publication of contradictory scientific papers

- discussions on how to conceal data sharing with critics

- discussions on how to conceal and dilute inconvenient data points

Some of these will surely be investigated further and with regard to the destruction and concealment of FOIA requested data, criminal charges are a real possibility.

And the most wonderful thing is we have only scratched the surface of what’s been made available.

For anyone interested, a searchable database of the data can be found here.

Vote Today

The Columbia Journalism Review has a good wrap-up of theirs and the rest of the “Reality Based Community’s” non reaction to today’s election:

With the off-year Election Day now upon us, press outlets as diverse as Fox News and The New York Times are continuing to overemphasize the broader significance of today’s contests. (The lead headline at NYTimes.com all day has read, “3 Contests on Election Day Could Signal Political Winds”—with, of course, a caution deep in the text that it is “probably not wise to draw broad lessons from Tuesday’s results.”) But, encouragingly, there’s also been quite a bit of pushback against that narrative from some influential Web sites and, in at least one case, from a leading newspaper.

I would agree that today’s elections aren’t going to mean much come next November when the real Mau Mauing is going to take place, but there seems to be this reflex from some quarters in the media to write off the elections as meaningless because it does reflect the national mood and Obama’s declining numbers to some extent. How to quantify this “extent” is certainly open to interpretation but what’s coming out of the left right now seems to be a lot of truthie spin about how meaningless these are. To say that New Jersey is “meaningless” is a good indication of how hard some are trying to unspin what is going down today. Obama has been campaign both publicly and privately for Corzine and a loss for Corzine today, in bluer than blue New Jersey no less, is a fairly significant bell weather of the wider national mood.

Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.