Just The Links, Please

Wherein I write a sentence or three about each.

• I think the Tories missed an opportunity to win control of Parliament outright and Republicans risk doing the same. What must they do? Follow Barone's advice and propose a bold plan that cuts Fed spending to ~20% of GDP.

• Think moderation of radical Islam is inevitable? Think again.

• That Rush Limbaugh, he's pretty clever.

• Education reform--real reform, not the kind proposed by teachers' unions--remains one of my highest order priorities.

• What's up with Anglo-American relations? Nothing good.

• I'll just use the article title since it's sooo good: No, You Can't Keep Your Health Plan.

• When you make terrorists into run-of-the-mill criminals it does damage to both our ability to prevent terror acts and to American civil liberties.

• Islam and Trotsky.

• There are real limits to Obama/Reid/Pelosi's ability to tax-and-spend--whether they realize it or not.

• Hypocritical Democrats aren't the only ones selling American education down the river--some Republicans do it too. It will come as no surprise to most of you that these Republicans reside in Illinois.

• That awesome European model for what America could do and be? Not so awesome. Hey Krugman, are you paying attention?

• A little push-back on financial reform.

• The fundamental problem of government bureaucracy.

• What happens when you prioritize "fairness" over freedom.

• What's going on in North Korea? Obama doesn't really know.

• Another great school-choice column. Love this stuff.

• North vs. South--not the Civil War but Europe.

• Another of my favorite hobby-horses--shale-based energy--and how it's going to bring on an energy revolution. But not the kind my friend Sameer keeps rapping (literally) about.

Enjoy!

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Markets Solve Energy Crisis, Natch

Don't listen to the Luddites and Malthusians. They're wrong, again.

Even if demand were still at pre-recession levels, advances in technology brought on by high prices would have sated world energy demands for generations.

America is not going to bleed its wealth importing fuel. Russia's grip on Europe's gas will weaken. Improvident Britain may avoid paralysing blackouts by mid-decade after all.

The World Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected.

Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, enough for 60 years' supply – and rising fast.

"There has been a revolution in the gas fields of North America. Reserve estimates are rising sharply as technology unlocks unconventional resources," he said.

This is almost unknown to the public, despite the efforts of Nick Grealy at "No Hot Air" who has been arguing for some time that Britain's shale reserves could replace declining North Sea output.

Rune Bjornson from Norway's StatoilHydro said exploitable reserves are much greater than supposed just three years ago and may meet global gas needs for generations.

"The common wisdom was that unconventional gas was too difficult, too expensive and too demanding," he said, according to Petroleum Economist. "This has changed. If we ever doubted that gas was the fuel of the future – in many ways there's the answer."

The breakthrough has been to combine 3-D seismic imaging with new technologies to free "tight gas" by smashing rocks, known as hydro-fracturing or "fracking" in the trade.

The US is leading the charge. Operations in Pennsylvania and Texas have already been sufficient to cut US imports of liquefied natural gas (LGN) from Trinidad and Qatar to almost nil, with knock-on effects for the global gas market – and crude oil. It is one reason why spot prices for some LNG deliveries have dropped to 50pc of pipeline contracts.

[...]

The US Energy Department expects shale to meet half of US gas demand within 20 years, if not earlier. Projects are cranking up in eastern France and Poland. Exploration is under way in Australia, India and China.

Texas A&M University said US methods could increase global gas reserves by nine times to 16,000 TCF (trillion cubic feet). Almost a quarter is in China but it may lack the water resources to harness the technology given the depletion of the North China water basin.

Needless to say, the Kremlin is irked. "There's a lot of myths about shale production," said Gazprom's Alexander Medvedev.

If the new forecasts are accurate, Gazprom is not going to be the perennial cash cow funding Russia's great power resurgence. Russia's budget may be in structural deficit.

As for the US, we may soon be looking at an era when gas, wind and solar power, combined with a smarter grid and a switch to electric cars returns the country to near energy self-sufficiency.

This has currency implications. If you strip out the energy deficit, America's vaulting savings rate may soon bring the current account back into surplus – and that is going to come at somebody else's expense, chiefly Japan, Germany and, up to a point, China.

Please, when listening to 'Prophets of Doom,' take their alarmist warnings with a healthy dose of skepticism. This applies specifically and perhaps most importantly to the High Priests of the Holy Church of Climate Change (long live Mother Gaia).

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

'Alternative Energy': Oil, Coal, & Natural Gas

I love this topic & I love posting things like this--a bit I found in the Notable & Quotable section of the Wall Street Journal, Jon Basil Utley writing in at Reason.com:

It's only a matter of time before President Barack Obama's vast popularity runs aground on his energy policies. In the name of saving the planet from global warming, he has delayed new oil drilling, an action that will have major political repercussions once the world economy recovers. Instead of using some [of] the stimulus billions to produce more gas and oil, Obama's wild-eyed supporters dream of "renewable" energy derived from corn, wind, sunshine, and even grass.

With the appointment of extremists like climate czar Carol Browner and science adviser John Holdren, Obama has placed his administration's environmental policy in the hands of radicals. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposes replacing oil and coal with windmills. Yet Barron's recently reported that America would need to build 500,000 giant offshore windmills and transmission lines to produce Salazar's specified 1,900 gigawatts of electricity. In contrast, oil and gas drilling could provide hundreds of thousands of solid, well-paying blue-collar jobs. . . .

All of these things are happening at a time when natural gas is abundant and cheap. The new technology of horizontal fraccing has made it economically feasible to drill into vast shale deposits in many states, even famously difficult ones like Michigan and New York. Many cars could run on natural gas, much like many buses do already. On a recent trip to Peru, I learned that most taxicabs have been converted to natural gas for a cost of about $1,000 each. New technologies continually revive old oil and gas fields and make new ones economically viable. So it's little more than socialist Malthusianism to argue that the world is running out of cheap energy. Science will always find and harness new sources.

History suggests that markets will always find a cheap source of energy.

As for me and my blog, I'll stick with the historically overwhelming power of the market, over the liberty-taking, economy-destroying, command & control social engineers in the Obama administration.

Cap & trade, in addition to being pointless from an "environmental" perspective and incredibly costly (effectively a huge tax on American families), is at its core an opportunity for your intellectual betters in the Obama administration to take control of a huge section of the American economy and your lives.

You see, they're smarter and more enlightened than you & me are and thus, should be controlling an ever-increasing portion of our lives.

It's about power & control: They own/run/influence a huge section of the financial industry as a result of TARP, etc., and now effectively control Chrysler. Next up? This is no secret. Government healthcare, cap & trade and other stuff I'm forgetting at the moment.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Oil Prices Fall & Other Good News

This is the good news, the silver lining, coming out of yesterday's precipitous market drop. Oil prices fell by over $10. And, the dollar had its biggest gain against the British pound in something like 15 years (so Drudge tells me).

Considering that Americans consume roughly 20.73 bbl/day, a $10/bbl savings means [open "Calculator," punch in a bunch of numbers, 20 mins. later ...] that Americans will save $207 million per day. A few more days like yesterday will go a long way towards covering the cost of the Paulson Plan!

American Thinker has an article about the current state of the oil game here in the United States. Janet Levy's section on "current supply estimates" is particularly instructive.

Although Congress has not authorized a thorough inventory of offshore resources for over 30 years, the American Petroleum Institute estimates recoverable U.S. oil resources at about 86 billion barrels offshore and 32 billion barrels onshore.[7] This estimate doesn't take into consideration technological advancements, unconventional sources and recent discoveries.

Currently, the United States is the only industrialized country in the world not actively seeking to explore new offshore resources. In fact, offshore drilling is allowed in most of the Gulf of Mexico but prohibited on the East Coast, West Coast and Alaska. Only 17% of non-park, non-wilderness federal land is open to energy development and 85% of coastal waters are off limits. Further, since 1983, the amount of federal land available for development has decreased by more than 60%.

Recent assessments of the extent of economically recoverable, conventional oil in two important locations -- the Bakken Formation and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) -- could increase these estimates considerably.

First discovered in 1953, the Bakken Formation covers part of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. In April of 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that Bakken contains 3 to 4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, a 25-fold increase from the agency's 1995 estimate. Market conditions and drilling and production advances could transform Bakken, the largest continuous oil accumulation in the lower 48 states, into one of the largest producing oil fields in the world.

Meanwhile, petroleum experts have estimated that ANWR contains anywhere from 9 to 16 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and could prove to be one of the largest oil fields yet in North America. Since current USGS estimates are based on the petroleum geology of adjacent lands, the true potential for oil recovery is uncertain.

Environmental arguments about risks to wildlife and pristine forests have kept ANWR off limits to energy development, even though such risks are unfounded. Drilling in the region would cover a mere tenth of one percent of its 19 million acres. Plus, ANWR is a flat, treeless plain with temperatures inhospitable for most animal species. The area is already home to a village of Native Americans, who support its development. It currently contains an airstrip, power lines, an oil well and a military radar site. Two decades of drilling in the North Slope area has had no negative effects on the ecology of the area and, during that time, the caribou population actually increased sevenfold.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Shale Oil & Energy Independence

This is what we've been talking about.

We have "more [oil shale reserves] than the entire world has consumed since oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in the 19th century."

(h/t Power Line)


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