Have a great Friday, yinz.
http://energytomorrow.org/blog/2017/02/03/americas-21st-century-energy-story
Friday Open, and Good Energy News
by coldwarrior ( 57 Comments › )Filed under Energy, Open thread at February 10th, 2017 - 8:25 am
Time to Retire the Carter Doctrine
by coldwarrior ( 65 Comments › )Filed under Energy, History, Military, Open thread at February 9th, 2017 - 8:07 am
On Christmas Day 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The socialist state eventually deployed more than one hundred thousand troops to the region and placed its armed forces within striking distance of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a great portion of the world’s oil supply transited. President Carter addressed Congress three weeks later and detailed the dangers he believed the USSR posed. The Soviet troops, he said, were seeking to dominate a region that contained two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil and posed “a grave threat” to the free movement of Middle East oil.
“This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come,” he said during the 1980 State of the Union Address. He later added: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”……In 1980, a hostile superpower was within striking distance of choking off a significant percentage of the oil necessary to power the United States. Not only is that no longer the case, but other nations are now more reliant on Persian Gulf oil than the United States. When the Carter Doctrine was first put into action, the Chinese were an oil exporter. They did not import any oil from the Middle East, but owing to a rapidly growing economy, they became a net oil importer in 1993.
China’s thirst for oil continues to rapidly grow. The country currently imports seven mbd of the twelve mbd it consumes—the vast majority of which comes from the Persian Gulf. Glaser and Kelanic explain that despite slowing economic growth, Beijing’s imports from the Gulf are expected to quintuple by 2030. Should the United States, then, continue to expend a great portion of its national-security budget to keep the Persian Gulf oil flowing for the benefit of China?
Clearly, a reexamination of U.S. strategy vis-à-vis the Middle East is in order. Even with the continued development of domestic oil and gas fields, along with the rise of alternative forms of energy, the United States is going to require some amount of oil from Saudi Arabia. But is that continued interest commensurate with the perpetuation, unaltered, of the Carter Doctrine? The answer is no.
There is presently no major power poised to strike oil facilities in the region. The United States gets no oil from Iran, so even if its exports are blocked in the future (owing to sanctions, for example), that block would have little impact on U.S. imports. The exporting countries themselves have an existential need to export large quantities of oil. For example, regimes in nations such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are economically dependent on oil revenue to maintain internal stability. It can be argued, therefore, that while Middle Eastern oil remains a U.S. interest, it is no longer a vital national interest. Our security posture and strategy should therefore be updated to reflect current realities and priorities.
The Cabinet
by coldwarrior ( 44 Comments › )Filed under Uncategorized at February 8th, 2017 - 8:03 am
Just a thought….in 2001, W had all of his Cabinet positions confirmed by this time.
The Uni-Party is really doing a great job against the will of the peeps this time ’round.
Zipf’s Law and Political Power
by coldwarrior ( 103 Comments › )Filed under Academia, Open thread, Politics at February 7th, 2017 - 6:00 am
The big cities are NOT taking over politics, nor are they wielding any more power than before. This is a dense read, please try to get through it, especially the math.
Zipf’s Law states that:
Zipf’s law typically holds when the “objects” themselves have a property (such as length or size) which is modelled by an exponential distribution or other skewed distribution that places restrictions on how often “larger” objects can occur.
An example of where Zipf’s law applies is in English texts, to frequency of word occurrence. The commonality of English words follows an exponential distribution, and the nature of communication is such that it is more efficient to place emphasis on using shorter words. Hence the most common words tend to be short and appear often, following Zipf’s law.
The value of θ typically ranges between 1 and 2, and is between 1.5 and 2 for the English text case.
Another example is the populations of cities. These follow Zipf’s law, with a few very populous cities, falling off to very numerous cities with a small population. In this case, there are societal forces which supply the same type of “restrictions” that limited which length of English words are used most often.
A final example is the income of companies. Once again the ranked incomes follow Zipf’s law, with competition pressures limiting the range of incomes available to most companies and determining the few most successful ones.
The underlying theme is that efficiency, competition, or attention with regards to resources or information tends to result in Zipf’s law holding to the ranking of objects or datum of concern.
So, let’s simplify this marvel of applied statistics into this:
The exact statement of Zipf’s Law involves more formal math than we usually explain here, but it basically states that if you take a specific country, count the number of cities at a certain population level and then count number of cities with twice that population, the former number will often be close to half of the latter.
Well, what does all of this mean?
Most people don’t think of New Mexico as a large state. Texas, California, Montana and Alaska are all significantly larger, and a number of other Western states are about the same size. But almost two-thirds of the U.S. population lives in a combined area about the size of New Mexico. That’s because most Americans live in or near cities.
And if you’ve been reading political commentary over the last decade or so, you might think that cities are about to take over (or have already taken over) our national politics. The urban population in the United States is expanding, and much of the economic growth related to technology and other new industries seems to be concentrated in cities and the surrounding areas.
But last month Sean Trende and I looked at the data and found that the largest urban centers in the United States hadn’t gained much political power over the last three decades. Moreover, Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing badly to Hillary Clinton in the largest cities. So it’s worth asking: What happened? Why hasn’t megalopolis America, with its increasing economic strength and growing population, taken over politics?
I looked into the data and found that while the largest American cities are growing, their relative power has been held down by similar levels of population growth in towns and smaller cities. And if we dive just a bit more deeply into these numbers, we’ll see that a simple, little-known but eerily accurate mathematical law might have predicted it all.
