From FactCheck.Org:

FactChecking McCain

September 5, 2008

He made some flubs in accepting the nomination.

We checked the accuracy of McCain’s speech accepting the Republican nomination and noted the following:

McCain claimed that Obama’s health care plan would "force small businesses to cut jobs" and would put "a bureaucrat ... between you and your doctor." In fact, the plan exempts small businesses, and those who have insurance now could keep the coverage they have.

McCain attacked Obama for voting for "corporate welfare" for oil companies. In fact, the bill Obama voted for raised taxes on oil companies by $300 million over 11 years while providing $5.8 billion in subsidies for renewable energy, energy efficiency and alternative fuels.

McCain said oil imports send "$700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much." But the U.S. is on track to import a total of only $536 billion worth of oil at current prices, and close to a third of that comes from Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

He promised to increase use of "wind, tide [and] solar" energy, though his actual energy plan contains no new money for renewable energy. He has said elsewhere that renewable sources won’t produce as much as people think.

He called for "reducing government spending and getting rid of failed programs," but as in the past failed to cite a single program that he would eliminate or reduce.

He said Obama would "close" markets to trade. In fact, Obama, though he once said he wanted to "renegotiate" the North American Free Trade Agreement, now says he simply wants to try to strengthen environmental and labor provisions in it.

But remember, it was never about the oil.....

from BBC:

China's state-owned oil firm CNPC has agreed a $3bn (£1.63bn) oil services contract with the government of Iraq. 

The two parties renegotiated a 1997 deal to pump oil from the Ahdab oilfield, the Iraqi oil minister said. 

Under the new deal, output from the oilfield will be 110,000 barrels per day, up from the 90,000 barrels forecast in the original deal. 

The deal is the first major oil contract with a foreign firm since the US-led war in Iraq, reports say. 

As security improves, Iraq - which has some of the biggest oil reserves in the Middle East - is trying to bring in foreign oil companies to boost crude output. 

It needs billions of dollars of investment after years of war and sanctions. 

Other foreign oil companies, such as Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil, are also negotiating deals with the Iraqi government. 

The Iraq government says its aim is to increase crude oil production from the current 2.5m barrels per day to 4.5m by 2013. 

Final agreement 

Production is set to begin at the Ahdab oilfield three years from now and the contract will run for 20 years. 

"Finally we have reached an agreement," Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi oil minister told Reuters. 

"The total investment of the project is expected to be about $3bn." 

CNPC would own 75% of a joint venture to be set up for the contract, with the remainder held by Iraq's Northern Oil Company. 

The field is located in Wasit province, 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of Baghdad, in a Shiite-dominated area that has seen sporadic violence.

It's the economy, stupid!

Inflation is Back

With the economy front and center, people are starting to worry about inflation. Even dirt is not dirt cheap any more. A bag of dirt (marketed as "premium topsoil") is about $4.99 now, up a dollar from last year, a 25% increase. Items like 40-pound bags of dirt, which are very heavy and don't generate much revenue per pound, tend to get hit hard by higher transportation costs due to costly oil. 

Peak Oil keeps getting weirder.

It seems that half of the refined products that we import to cover the daily shortfall of oil production vs usage,  is used to make refined products we then export. Yes half the so called shortage is really just pass thru. When will we realize that Big Oil doesn't care a whit about our security and are purely interested in ripping as much profit from the system as they can before it all comes crashing down? 

WASHINGTON3 (Reuters) - While the U.S. oil industry want access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, American-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries.
 
A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. Shipments this February topped 1.8 million barrels a day for the first time during any month, according to final numbers from the Energy Department.
 
The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush administration for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
 
"We can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country," President Bush told reporters this week. "We have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home."
 
"As a nation, we can have more control over our energy destiny by supplying more of the oil and natural gas we'll be consuming from resources here at home," Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum (otcbb: AMPE.OB - news - people ) Institute, said in a letter last week to U.S. lawmakers.
 
But environmentalists and other opponents to expanding drilling areas could seize on the record exports to argue Congress should not open more acres if U.S. refineries are churning crude oil into petroleum products that are sent out of the American market.
 
"It doesn't look good to say: 'We need more oil.' But then export the refined products that you're getting. It doesn't seem to be consistent," said Jim Presswood, energy lobbyist for the Natural 
Resources Defense Council.
 
But many energy experts say oil and petroleum products are traded globally, and it may make economic sense to export gasoline refined along the U.S. Gulf Coast to Latin America and import European-refined gasoline to U.S. East Coast markets.
 
"The fact is that the (United States) participates in global markets for both crude and refined products, and there are any number of variables that impact supply and prices in those markets," said Bill Holbrook, spokesman for the National Petrochemicals and Refiners 
Association.
 
The 1.6 million barrels a day in record petroleum exports represented 9 percent of total U.S. refining capacity of 17.6 million barrels a day.
 
However, with refiners operating at 85 percent of capacity during the January-April period, the shipments represented a much a larger share of total U.S. oil products produced.
 
The exports were also equal to half the 3.2 million barrels of gasoline, diesel fuel and other petroleum products the United States imported each day over the 4-month period.
 
The biggest share of U.S. oil products exported went to Mexico, Canada, Chile, Singapore and Brazil.
 
U.S. consumers are paying record prices for gasoline and diesel fuel, which the Bush administration blames in part on tight supplies.
 
While the administration argues that more supplies would help to bring down prices, U.S exports of diesel fuel in April averaged 387,000 barrels per day, up almost seven-fold from 59,000 barrels a day in the same month a year earlier.
 
U.S. gasoline shipments in April averaged 202,000 barrels a day, the most for the month since 1945, when America was sending fuel overseas to ease supply shortages in other countries during World War II. Gasoline exports in April 2007 were almost half at 116,000 barrels per day.
 
Residual fuel exports in April were 377,000 barrels per day, the fourth highest level for any month, and up 10 percent from 344,000 barrels per day a year earlier.
 
John Felmy, the chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, said a portion of the oil products exported, especially diesel, was fuel that did not meet U.S. clean air requirements and therefore could not be sold in America. "You may have some that you're not able to use," he said.
 
Also, while U.S. gasoline demand is down due to high prices and a weak American economy, there is "strong economic growth outside the United States" where fuel is often subsidized and demand is high, said John Cook, director of EIA's Petroleum Division.
 
However, both the EIA and API admitted they did not know why daily U.S. gasoline exports to Canada skyrocketed to 41,000 barrels in January-April this year from 9,000 barrels in 2007.
 
The EIA said more U.S. diesel is going to Latin American to fuel power plants because of a shortage of natural gas in the region, and China has switched to diesel from coal to run some of its generating facilities in order to reduce smog ahead of the summer Olympics next month in Beijing. 

Nine meals from anarchy

I'm so used to being called a nutjob when I worry aloud about this stuff that it is a shock to find an article like this is a middle of the road mainstream newspaper.

from The Daily Mail:

Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis 

By Rosie Boycott

The phrase 'nine meals from anarchy' sounds more like the title of a bad Hollywood movie than any genuine threat.

But that was the expression coined by Lord Cameron of Dillington, a farmer who was the first head of the Countryside Agency - the quango set up by Tony Blair in the days when he pretended to care about the countryside - to describe just how perilous Britain's food supply actually is. 

Long before many others, Cameron saw the potential of a real food crisis striking not just the poor of the Third World, but us, here in Britain, in the 21st Century. 

The scenario goes like this. Imagine a sudden shutdown of oil supplies; a sudden collapse in the petrol that streams steadily through the pumps and so into the engines of the lorries which deliver our food around the country, stocking up the supermarket shelves as soon as any item runs out. 

If the trucks stopped moving, we'd start to worry and we'd head out to the shops, cking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We'd be in a panic. Day three: still no petrol. 

What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn't stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could get their hands on? 

There might be 11 million gardeners in Britain, but your delicious summer peas won't go far when your kids are hungry and the baked beans have run out. 

It was Lord Cameron's estimation that it would take just nine meals - three full days without food on supermarket shelves - before law and order started to break down, and British streets descended into chaos. 

A far-fetched warning for a First World nation like Britain? Hardly. Because that's exactly what happened in the U.S. in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. People looted in order to feed themselves and their families. 

If a similar tragedy was to befall Britain, we are fooling ourselves if we imagine we would not witness similar scenes of crime and disorder. 

Well, today Britain is facing a very real crisis. Granted, it is not the threat of a sudden, terrifying phenomenon such as the hurricane that struck New Orleans. But in its capacity to cause widespread hardship and deprivation nationwide, it is every bit as daunting. 

Oil prices are spiralling - $120 a barrel this week, up 23 per cent since the start of the year - and the cost is being felt not only by drivers but by each and every one of us who has seen our food bills soaring. 

This week, the British Retail Consortium revealed that food price inflation had risen to 6 per cent - the highest figure since comparable records began - and up from 4.7 per cent in April and 4.1 per cent in March. 

At its most basic, the reasons for this food inflation are twofold: increasing demand (particularly in the emerging economies of India and China) and spiralling production costs. 

The former had been predicted for years, but the latter is more unexpected. 

Conventional wisdom had it that in an age of mechanisation, the cost of producing the food that we eat would decrease as technology found new ways of improving yields and minimising labour costs. But there was a problem that hadn't been factored in. Production methods are now such that 95 per cent of all the food we eat in the world today is oil-dependent.

The 'black gold' is embedded in our complex global food systems, in its fertilisers, the mechanisation necessary for its production, its transportation and its packaging. 

For example, to farm a single cow and deliver it to market requires the equivalent of six barrels of oil - enough to drive a car from New York to LA. 

Unbelievable? One analysis of the fodder pellets which are fed to the vast majority of beef cows to supplement their grazing found that they were made up of ingredients that had originated in six different countries. Think of the fuel required to transport that lot around the world. 

Now factor in the the diesel used by the farm vehicles, the carbon footprint of chemical fertilisers used by most nonorganic beef farms and the energy required to transport a cow to the abattoir and process it. The total oil requirement soon adds up. 

And so as oil prices have risen, so too has the cost of food - and I'm afraid it's only set to get worse. The age of cheap food is at an end - and it will impact not only on our supermarket bills, but on the whole economy.

Fifty years ago, food represented around 30 per cent of the average household budget, whereas nowadays it is nearer to 9 per cent. 

In other words, cheap food has not only helped keep inflation down, it also allowed the postwar consumer boom to flourish. 

With our most basic and necessary commodity - the food on our plates - costing proportionally less every decade, we had plenty of free capital to spend on luxuries: flat-screen TVs; the holidays abroad; the home improvements and extensions that so many of us have acquired. 

That's all set to change in a major way. A new era of austerity is approaching, and we are illpreparedfor its scale and effect. As a farmer myself, who runs a smallholding in Somerset, I was one of the first to detect the winds of change, as the prices for my animal feed rose. (more)

from Yahoo's Running on Empty group:

That leads me to the thought that if the U.S. administration had demanded the same degree of proof and certainty of Iraq's WMD that they are constantly demanding for Global Warming and Peak Oil then the U.S. invasion of Iraq would never have taken place.

Richard E

Corn surges to new record on rainy weather, dollar

More trouble on the food supply front....


from Forbes Magazine 

Corn futures shot up to a record for a second day Friday, driven higher by heavy rain in Midwestern states, a slumping dollar and skyrocketing crude oil prices.

Other commodities traded broadly higher, with crude oil soaring almost $10 and gold, silver, copper and other agriculture futures also rising sharply.

Heavy rains have flooded corn crops in Indiana, Ohio, Nebraska and other states, giving farmers their wettest spring since 1993 and severely delaying planting. Forecasts show the bad weather moving toward the western corn belt states of Minnesota and Wisconsin over the next several days.

"It's all about the weather. People have had to replant fields a third time and it's completely unknown how the flooding is going to affect yields," said Elaine Kub, analyst with DTN in Omaha.

Corn for July delivery surged to an all-time high of $6.6325 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade before easing back to $6.52, still up $8.75 cents. Corn prices have jumped 35 percent since the start of the year.  (more)

T. Boone Pickens Says Peak Oil Reached, Plans World’s Largest Wind Farm

from CleanTechnica.com:


When one of Texas’s richest oil men bets big on wind energy, it gets attention. Yesterday NPR’s Living on Earth broadcast an interview with Mr. Pickens, who shared the salient facts about his planned wind project:

• It will be the largest in the world, he reckons, at 4,000 megawatts
  
• 
  
• It will provide enough power for 1,300,000 homes
  
• 
  
• It’s a $10 billion dollar project from which he plans a 15%-25% profit

Asked why he is investing in wind now, Pickens replied:

“For a number of years I’ve watched the wind turbines develop — and I feel like it’s time for it. I think that oil has peaked at 85 million barrels in the world. We’ve got to develop other forms of energy — wind, I think solar will be next, and I hope I’m still around to be in the solar deal.” (Pickens is 80 years old.

But what if Congress doesn’t vote to extend the wind Production Tax Credit?

“Well, I think they’ll vote on it. They’ll either do that or they’ll give some kind of carbon credit because, the wind has to be developed in the United States. We’re now importing 72 percent of the oil we use every day. I think everybody can see that we’re gonna break the country if we pay 700 billion dollars a year for, uh, imported oil……I’ve got a good team of people that are knowledgeable in wind energy, and I don’t worry about it. I think it’s a good project, and it’ll do well and we’ll make money. And it’ll help the country.”

Look at Pickens’s bio on Wikipedia. He grew up poor but worked hard. He became a geologist in the 50’s, which “were difficult times for the oil industry and petroleum geologists.” He stuck at it and obviously his bet on oil paid off; Pickens is worth $3 billion now. But he’s moving on — to wind. Find out more about this story in the current issue of Fast Company.