Keeping Score

Back in early 2003, before the Ir aq war started, my father and I discussed the possibility of war and whether we supported it or not. I was tentatively in favor, but on two conditions: (i) that the Bush administration had sound reasons for going to war, and (ii) it knew what it was getting into and had thought carefully about how it was going to handle the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. I had grave concerns about whether those conditions were true, and didn’t like our chances if they weren’t.

Well, my concerns turned out to be well-founded, unfortunately. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I successfully predicted the future, but my predictions turned out to be more accurate than a lot of what passed for political commentary at the time. Which is a very telling mark on the state of commentary. I’m reasonably well-educated, but certainly no expert on foreign and current affairs. I should be totally outclassed by people whose job it is to keep up with this sort of thing.

What kills me is to see that writers who were wrong back then, and have continually been wrong since, still have an audience. And they’re still making predictions and telling us what the U.S. should be doing next, as if they had any credibility. It would be awesome if there was a way of keeping score on how accurate pundits are, and if the scores of each were posted in any publications the pundits produced.

That would be tricky to pull off, since many pundits, right or left, are weaselly and either don’t make predictions that are specific and measurable enough to be able to be proved wrong. But I’m sure it could be done. For example, I would have asked these questions, among others, in 2003:

1. How many U.S. troops will be stationed in Iraq 
     in the year 2006?
   a. Less than a thousand
   b. 1000-25,000
   c. 25,000 – 150,000
   d. Over 150,000

2. How much money will the U.S. have spent on the war 
     by the year 2006?
   a. …
   b. …

3. How many American servicemen and women will have been 
     killed in Iraq by the year 2006?

Actually, I would ask two versions of such questions; one to predict the future for the next calendar year, and the other to make a longer-term prediction; say for five years. If we recorded peoples’ predictions every year, then we’d have an objective record of who was accurate and who wasn’t. Then hopefully, the inaccurate commentators would decline in influence, on the grounds of sucking at their jobs, and everybody knowing it.

Keeping score like this would be good for writers and readers. It would force writers to take their jobs a little more seriously. A lot of commentators, right and left, are simply preaching to the choir and saying what they and/or their supporters want to hear. Likewise, many people read from sources that say what the people want to hear, and it would be good for them to know the weaknesses of such sources.

I’m actually speaking from experience here, somewhat. I generally lean liberal, but I have a good enough memory to have a sense of who’s consistently right or wrong, and when I see that arguments that I like on the surface turn out wrong enough, I start to discount them.

The Course of History

There are two measures on the Colorado ballot next week that are about gay rights. One establishes rights for domestic partnerships; the other outlaws gay marriage. I’m not sure how things are currently polling; last I heard, both were very close. If I had to guess, I would say that both will pass.

It is clear how this battle in the culture wars will end, with equal rights (and responsibilities) for gay couples as for straight. It might take a while, but by the time my children are my age, this fight will be a thing of the past, at least in most of the country.

My confidence comes from looking at how similar struggles played out in the past. Our society has moved steadily away from allowing discrimination against people based on biology. It happened with gender; it happened with race; it happened with age and physical ability, and it will be no different with sexual orientation.

I know, I know, this is a safe prediction to make, if only because of demographics. Opposition to gay rights is strongest among the older generations, and they are gradually being replaced by the young, who are more tolerant. But I doubt it’s going to take that long; once a few states allow gay marriage and people realize that the apocalypse is not among us, enough resistance will crumble to make tolerance of gay relationships widespread.

So what’s my point? I guess I’m just dismayed at all the attention that the issue is getting, and all the national effort that is being expended, when it’s absolutely clear how the matter will end. Don’t we have more important things to worry about? That’s not a rhetorical question. If you’re strongly anti-gay, of course you don’t want to just give in on the issue. But aren’t there other issues that concern you, and wouldn’t it be worth focusing your efforts on one of those instead of burning them in a cause that will be hopeless in the next fifteen years? Or do you fight the good fight, knowing that you’re doomed? Or do you not believe you are doomed, even though the march of history is against you?

Book Notes: Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land

Notes on Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land
John Opie, 1993 (second edition: 2000)
Read September-October 2006

The Ogallala aquifer underlies 174,000 square miles of the Great Plains; roughly you can think of it as a 150-mile north-south column running from the base of the Texas panhandle up through the northern border of Nebraska, where it then spills out over almost that entire state. Somewhat conveniently, that area happens to receive too little rainfall for dry-farming, and the presence of the Ogallala has allowed a very productive agricultural system to arise. The rub is that the waters of the aquifer, while huge, are limited, and exhaustion has already started to happen.

This book covers a wide scope, including the history (natural and human) of the region, and discusses the economic and agricultural forces at play. Larger themes, such as the future of the family farm, are also discussed, but generally from the perspective of the western Great Plains.

The strengths of the book were its comprehensiveness and the number of though-provoking questions it raised. I enjoyed the book, but it was a bit dry and slow in spots. Unfortunately, the book already needs an update – it was written when the eventuality of exhaustion was starting to be taken seriously, and it would be interesting to know where things stand now.

The book focuses on the southern part of the aquifer area: southern Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and to a lesser extent, the Texas panhandle. Nebraska and northern Kansas are generally ignored, although much of the story applies to them as well.

Selected points of interest:

History
In short, the Great Plains were considered an uninhabitable desert for quite a while; then settlers came with the philosophy of “rain follows the plow” – sow the ground and the rain will come. And the first wave of settlement did coincide with a wet cycle, and people were happy. Then a drought hit, and the land couldn’t sustain everyone, so many people left. If you want to learn about the history of the settlement of the Great Plains, I wouldn’t start with this book, but it did fill out some details.

- The boom-bust cycles were ongoing.
- The bad times didn’t end with the Great Depression. There was severe drought in the early 50’s, along with dust bowls problems that were just as bad as in the ‘30’s.
- Detail about New Deal programs to pay people to leave the dry parts of the plains; this is where the National Grasslands of eastern Colorado and Wyoming, and western Oklahoma and Texas came about.
- In general, the debate about whether the region is suitable for agriculture, and whether government should subsidize the region, has been going on for quite a while; about a century now.

Everything started changing in the 1950’s, when pumping technology became more affordable. The size of the aquifer meant that farmers were now free from depending upon rain.

There was, and still is, a lot of water in the aquifer, whose width ran into the hundreds of feet. Irrigation generally consumes one to three feet of that water, if I remember correctly. The aquifer gets replenished from natural sources at less than an inch per year. In general, farmers were looking at a fifty-hundred year water supply if consumption was at full bore.

The first responses to the supposition that the water wasn’t endless were generally one of denial – either that was just scare mongering – that the aquifer really wouldn’t run dry, or that science and technology would come to the rescue by finding other sources. Conservation was not considered to be an option, especially if it came at the cost of crop production.

But reality did set in, and it didn’t take long. This is a much more cut-and-dried situation than the issue of how much oil is left in the world. The amount of water remaining in the aquifer at any given point is relatively well-understood; moreover, as water levels lowered, pumping costs rose, which became apparent to any irrigation farmer.

The question then, is what to do with the water left in the ground. Do you use it in a way to maximize crop production, thus “burning” it quickly, and then deal with the effects of running out when you get there, or do you conserve so as to make the water last for longer (but still not indefinitely)? It should be noted that nobody in the region contemplates just leaving the water in the ground. The debate is about how fast to extract the water and what to do with it when you get it to the surface.

On a personal note – I’m not sure what to make of that last point. The city-slicker conservationist in me worries about using anything up totally. On the other hand, why not use the water? It doesn’t do any good to anybody, even the biological environment, to be sitting five hundred feet underground. Of course, if it were me farming the land, and my options were insolvency, back-breaking labor doing subsistence farming or getting slightly ahead by pumping, I know what I would do.

Back to the discussion of how to use the water. This is where it gets interesting. Farmers in the region are very independent and distrustful of government. And initially there was no way they were going to stand for any restrictions on how they could use the water on their land. But that philosophy turned out to have some problems.

Pigs

One of the major trends as of the writing of this book was that large-scale hog farms were coming to the western Oklahoma and southern Kansas region. In some ways, that’s a good place for it – although pigs are more efficient at turning grain into protein than cows, they pollute at a much higher rate. Better to do that polluting on the plains, with low population densities and dry air. Still, there are concerns:
- Hog farms use more water than crop agriculture. Is it fair for the hog farms to be slurping up more water than their neighbors?
- With no zoning regulations (at least not initially), someone could open up a hog farm right next to your farm. The odors would make your farm essentially uninhabitable.

Oil
Water is used, heavily, in oil extraction. Water is pumped into oil fields to make the oil rise, where it can be pumped out. The southwestern Great Plains overlaps the Texas-Oklahoma oil region. Guess who has more political pull, big oil or family farmers?

The author quotes a statistic that in this region, it takes 520 gallons of water to produce a gallon of oil. You can’t reuse this water for agriculture, since it has been polluted with chemicals. Making the use of Ogallala water more wasteful is the fact that the oil drillers could use salt water from deeper reservoirs. That would be slightly more expensive, but would not change the overall viability of oil production in the region. But since Ogallala water is free to whoever pumps it, might as well use it even if it saves a penny per gallon of gas.

So the farmers are in a bind. The Ogallala is interconnected; the water levels generally get lowered across a large area. So if you insist on property rights, bigger neighbors can apply them to suck up your water. Even without the bigger neighbors, if you conserve but surrounding farmers don’t, then you’re a chump. They get higher yields by using “your” water. This promotes a “use-it-or-lose-it” attitude; not good for long-term conservation.

As a result, farmers have generally bowed to the inevitable and pressured state legislatures to regulate water consumption better. (By the way, I can’t refrain from pointing out the well-known fact that although residents of this region may be independent and anti-government, they are also heavily dependent upon government subsidies. But that’s a subject for another time.)

Of course, this whole subject brings up my favorite economic topic, externalities. If a price could be placed on depleting the aquifer (e.g. what would the cost to Plains residents, American food consumers, farmers), then you could consume as much of the aquifer as you want. You just need to pay some tax which will eventually be used to reimburse, in some sense, the people that your consumption is costing.

There have been some plans to supply fresh water to the Great Plains by rerouting rivers. The more modest (very relatively speaking) proposals involved reversing the Niobrara River in Nebraska or diverting the Arkansas River. The big-league proposals involved diverting water from the massive rivers in Canada. The multi-hundred billion dollar price tags involved dampened enthusiasm, and the age of the Corps of Engineers-style big resculpting of nature has gone out of fashion. At least for now.

The book spends some time discussing the future of the family farm in the U.S. Obviously, that’s a huge subject, and not totally relevant to the book, but I found the discussion to be very interesting. Paraphrasing the author: in some ways, the family farm is an anachronism. Agriculture is the only sizeable cottage industry left in the country. It’s main reason for existence today is that our society has determined that it’s important for moral reasons. One of the weaknesses include the large number of skills required of just a few people to be successful. That’s the case for all industries, but businesses generally have the luxury of being able to delegate tasks to people who are best suited for each. That’s harder to do when you have just two people running the whole show. More important is the subject of risk management. Family farms are small units and each must manage risk (generally through diversification) on its own. A larger enterprise can do that more efficiently and probably more wisely, since the cost of failure in some small segment is not absolute ruin for the people involved.

Still, Opie suggests that in the end, the family farm may be the best way to go. Its primary advantage (for the country) is that farmers who live on and own their land are in it for the long term, and they are much more aware of and sensitive to environmental issues.

Some selected quotes I found interesting:

p. 245 – In 1980 the USDA determined that a selected set of 115,000 “produced almost three-quarters of all the nation’s strategic foods: wheat, corn, and soybeans. These 115,000 farms could produce enough to fulfill the nation’s basic grain needs, support overseas exports, and still maintain a surplus.”

On global warming – “the United States would have specific ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, and the old Dust Bowl region is always listed as a ‘loser’.”

“The irony of Ogallala irrigation is that while it has done so much to prevent perennial disaster from drought it has created new risks and expenses. Its need for heavy equipment investments, integration into outside markets, and dependence upon government support all transformed a highly valued farming lifestyle into an industrial operation. Boomlike development started a rush to consume soil and water and a demand for costly equipment and new fertilizers and pesticides. Profit-centered production has undermined customary rural lifestyles and shortened the life span of water and land.”

Northeastern Colorado Representatives

Speaking of Colorado politics – I’m a fan of eastern and northeastern Colorado in general, but what’s the deal with their lousy choice of Congressional representatives? In 1990 they chose Wayne Allard, who has two claims to fame: (i) he’s not liberal, and (ii) he doesn’t like gays. His one activity of note during his fifteen years in Washington D.C. was sponsoring the anti-gay marriage amendment of last year. Both of his senatorial campaigns were run on an agenda of not being liberal (with no real specifics beyond that). Colorado being a slightly conservative state overall, that proved enough to get him 51% of the vote each time. Time Magazine recently named him one of the five worst senators in America, on grounds of being invisible. That’s probably too harsh; there are plenty of senators who are actively worse, but let’s just say his tenure has hardly been inspiring.

The current representative for Colorado District 4 is Marilyn Musgrave, who is the darling of the extreme Right because she hates gays. This has worked out well for her; being the darling means more campaign donations and keeps her elected. Her campaign this season has been totally pathetic; her entire message to voter has been that her opponent declared bankruptcy in the past and is therefore a cheat. Nothing wrong with bringing that up, but gee Marilyn, would you mind just once telling everyone what your voting record is and what you stand for? Of course, most of us know the answers to those, but it’s funny that she’s so self-righteous but apparently chicken enough not to be honest about her self in her campaign.

Before Allard came Hank Brown, who was also something of a putz, but by comparison to Allard and Musgrave he is looking positively statesmanlike. He’s also done decent (afaik) work as president of UNC and CU.

I should cut northeast Colorado some slack. In between Allard and Musgrave came Bob Schaffer, who I thought was a fairly decent legislator and representative. He’s out of office now, being that political rarity: a candidate who term limits and upon being elected actually kept a pledge to retire.

I just looked at the map of District 4. That has a weird shape. It includes the liberal areas of Fort Collins and parts of Boulder county, as well as the whole of the eastern third of Colorado. So Lamar and Fort Collins – 220 miles apart and vastly different culturally – get to be represented by the same person. Great.

Election Day 2006

Sent in my early ballot last week. Here are my votes for the upcoming election.

Congressman – Mark Udall (over some nobody)
From all I can tell, Udall is thoughtful and tries hard to represent his constituents well; this one’s a no-brainer.

Governor – Bill Ritter (over Bob Beauprez)
Mostly a party-line vote. As I said previously, Beauprez’s campaign performance has not been promising. I don’t actually think he wouldn’t be any worse a governor than Bill Owens (who has been passable), but I think Ritter has more upside.

Rest of the state-wide offices
Not voting; I don’t know enough about the people involved. Except for …

Secretary of State – Ken Gordon (over Mike Coffman)
I wasn’t going to vote this one as well. Then I remembered that the Secretary of State is in charge of administering elections, and remembered what happened in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, where the respective officers tried to, well, swing elections their way. I’ve heard good things about Coffman, but I’m taking no chances. Party-line vote for the Democrats.

Amendments and Referenda:

Amendment 38 – Petitions – No
Makes the process for getting a petition on the ballot easier to accomplish. We’ve got enough wacky stuff getting on the ballot (see: 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44); we don’t need to make the process easier.

Amendment 39 – School Spending Requirements - No
Requires school districts to spend a certain percentage of their budgets on classroom expenditures. School boards are locally elected and run; they know best. I shouldn’t be telling the school board in Durango how to spend their money.

Amendment 40 – Term limits for judges – No
I haven’t heard enough evidence that the current system is broken to want to try a risky fix.

Amendment 41 – Standards of Conduct in Government – No
Expands rules on gifts from lobbyists, etc. I don’t know much about this one, to be honest, but again I don’t see the evidence that this will fix a serious problem in the current system. I do like the idea of reducing untoward lobbying influence, but I don’t think this is the way to do it.

Amendment 42 - Colorado Minimum Wage – No
Increases the minimum wage, and dictates annual increases. I think the current minimum wage is scandalously low, but I don’t think it should be in the constitution. I also don’t like the automatic annual increase, as that would not be good come a recession. Sure, it would get repealed the next election, but we might have to wait two years for that. If this was just going to be state law, I would vote for it.

Amendment 43 – Marriage – No
The “marriage is between one man and one woman” proposal. Can’t see that it matters all that much.

Amendment 44 – Marijuana Possession – Yes
Legalizes possession of up to one ounce of marijuana. I have mixed feelings on drug legalization as a whole, but I know enough marijuana users to be confident that this particular drug is no more dangerous than the legal drugs tobacco or alcohol. I can’t think of any serious reason why it should be illegal.

Ordinarily, I would vote against this on grounds that this should be a law and not a constitutional amendment. But the pointless drug war is starting to hack me off. Consider this a message vote.

Referendum E - Property Tax Reduction for Disabled Veterans - No
I could go either way, but I’m voting against this just because it seems a better proposal would be need-based. Maybe that’s not a very good reason to turn it down.

Referendum F – Recall Deadlines - abstain
This is actually probably a good thing, but I didn’t take the time to research it well enough to come to a decision. I know it’s pretty lame thing that I couldn’t find the time to figure this one out, but so be it.

Referendum G – Obsolete Constitutional Provisions - Yes

Referendum H – Limiting a State Business Income Tax Deduction - No
Increases state taxes for businesses that employ illegal aliens. Seems pointless since the trouble is that most business don’t report hiring illegals. Let’s address the illegal immigration issue more comprehensively instead of throwing around a bunch of half-baked proposals.

Referendum I – Domestic Partnerships - Yes
Establishes rights for domestic partnerships. Yes, of course. This is a good thing to do.

Referendum J – School District Spending Requirements - No
See Amendment 39.

Referendum K – Immigration Lawsuit Against Federal Government – No
The dumbest proposal on the whole ballot. Hey, if you want the feds to do anything, use your votes for Congress instead of wasting our money on quixotic lawsuits.

Some Political Advice

Every few years, there’s some Hollywood movie about some normal guy who goes to Washington and straightens things out, mostly by virtue of his being normal. Dave is probably the preeminent example for our generation. Such movies are reassuring and make us feel good, but I don’t buy into the general premise. The U.S. is a big and complicated country, and our government is big and complicated, so why should anyone expect that a person with no background could just waltz in and have much of a positive impact on things.

That being said, I do know about one skill that many politicians could stand to learn – the ability to admit to inconsequential flaws and move on. Case in point, Colorado’s own Bob Beauprez, running for governor against Bill Ritter, former Denver D.A. The campaign heated up last week with revelations that the Beauprez campaign received information, subsequently used in an attack ad against Ritter, that was illegally obtained from a confidential government database. The individual who accessed the database is not related to the campaign, and there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing by Beauprez or his people.

It should have been easy for Beauprez to come clean, say he didn’t know the information was ill-gotten and that he doesn’t condone breaking the law, all while keeping the anti-Ritter point of the information alive. And leave it at that. Nobody would have held it against him, at least nobody who has not already made up their mind. But no, he had to take the offensive, holding a press conference where he called his source a courageous man trying to reveal terrible misdoings by Ritter, and now Ritter is trying to destroy that man.

The statement Beauprez put out is funny, in a sad way of course. To see the text, google “My campaign is cooperating fully”. So let me get this straight – you had evidence of some “dirty little secret” of Ritter that has made Denver significantly less safe … and the best thing you could do with the information was to sit on it for a few months and then package it up into a TV ad. Bob, you’re a Congressman! You have influence; people listen to you; why didn’t you take advantage of that?

I’m getting off track. His statement was on the hysterical side, but didn’t reassure anyone that he respected the law. Instead, it raised questions about his judgment, and about how he handles mistakes in public. It was not a reassuring performance. Worse, it kept an embarrassing (for him) incident in the public eye. Ritter has already come out with ads flogging Beauprez for his handling of the incident. Of course, I’m not sure I’d want to play the hand too far if I were Ritter, as it also keeps the substance of Beauprez’s original complaint alive.

This happens more time than it should, someone getting tripped up over some small fault. A simple apology could have dealt with the matter, but for some reason it’s political Rule Number One to never admit anything. So you divert attention, or out-and-out lie and deny the fault. Then the story becomes your evasion and is bigger than the original issue ever could have been. The all-time example of this, of course, is Bill and Monica, but it keeps happening over and over again. It just kills me that people who are that smart, and have tons of smart advisors, do this.

I want a leader who is honest, is smart enough to admit mistakes (and then try to correct them), and do the right thing in general. Campaigns usually don’t tell you much, but Beauprez sure is stumbling this time.

Book Notes: Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage

Review and Notes on: Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage
Kenneth Deffeyes, 2001
Read September 2006

The main point of this book is to argue that the world is approaching peak oil. Deffeyes argues that the peak will certainly hit before 2010.

Summary
All opinions stated are that of the author.

Chapter 1: Overview.
Chapter 2: The Origin of Oil – background on oil and where it is found.
Chapter 3: Oil Reservoirs and Oil Traps – more geological background on oil fields and their properties.
Chapter 4: Finding It – Discussion of oil exploration methods.
Chapter 5: Drilling methods – background on oil drilling

Chapter 6: Size and Discoverability of Oil Fields
This is where it gets interesting in terms of peak oil.

Deffeyes starts this question by asking how what part of the discovery of oil is by chance. He takes Kansas as a case study; as it has been highly, if not thoroughly, explored, the geology is well understood, and the historical records are good. For Kansas, he suggests that if you had drilled at random points, your discovery rate would have matched the actual.

The discussion then skips to “Zipf’s Law”, which states that for many phenomena, if you rank measurements in order, and then multiply the measurement value by the rank, the result is a constant number. The example given is that of populations of cities in Belgium:

City	Rank	Population (,000)	Rank * Population (,000)
Brussels	1	953	953
Antwerp	2	450	900
Ghent	3	225	674
Charleroi	4	204	815
…
Lier	27	32	859

Deffeyes notes that the same law applies to the size of oil fields. His conclusions here are that finding a few new supergiant fields can be consistent with Zipf’s law. Ditto for finding many new smaller fields. But to be useful, or at least, interesting to major oil companies, new oil fields have to be very large. I honestly can’t follow the logic flow here, but a little later, he presents his conclusion: “The conclusion for future oil supplies is that oil fields bigger than 2 billion barrels contain more than half of the existing oil. … If there is a future oil supply, it has to be anchored by big oil fields.”

Some discussion about where big oil fields have been found in the past, and undiscovered oil in the Middle East.

One interesting point: the North Sea oil fields have been discovered and produced much more rapidly than others. “The North Sea province will have a lifetime, from discovery to depletion, about half as long as those of other major petroleum provinces.” This is for two reasons: seismic methods work better at sea than on land, and the fields were more homogeneous than most.

Chapter 7: Hubbert Revisited – rundown of Hubbert’s prediction and his methods.

See my blog article for more details: http://northern-flicker.blogspot.com/2006/10/hubberts-method.html

Chapter 8: Rate Plots – looking at production data in terms of logistic curves.

Chapter 9: The Future of Fossil Fuels – Heavy oil, oil shale, natural gas, and other topics.
This and the rest of the book are somewhat perfunctory.

Chapter 10: Alternative Energy Sources – geothermal, nuclear, solar, wind

Chapter 11: A New Outlook

Comments and Review
This book reminds me a lot of some of my college professors, and not in a good way. Their lectures consisted of one part basic material and one part “application”, which generally was some personal experience or research that was only tangentially related, and didn’t really illustrate any basic principles. The lectures didn’t fit together; it was rarely clear what the professor was trying to get across, and the whole enterprise was a rambling, disjointed affair.

This book follows that pattern. The background material can certainly be interesting at times, but there are numerous digressions and asides that don’t contribute much of anything. Worse, there is no sense of how pieces fit together. That all comes to a head in chapters 6-8, where Deffeyes argues the state of the world’s oil supply. Seriously – there is nothing in the first five chapters that are used by the later analysis.

The analysis itself is similarly frustrating. I’ve read and reread Chapter 6 (Size and Discovery of Oil Fields) many times trying to make sense of it, and I can only dimly make sense of a logical argument. Going into a little detail: Deffeyes starts by asking if random exploratory drilling is be more or less effective than something more planned. Great question, and the pages spent here are interesting. But then Deffeyes abruptly switches gear to Zipf distributions, and that first part of the chapter is not referred to again in the rest of the book.

It’s hard to see what he’s trying to prove with the Zipf stuff, or that he’s particularly successful. Zipf distributions are descriptive, not predictive, and I can’t see how you can make any kind of confident prediction using those grounds. (An aside of my own: the idea that city populations follow Zipf distributions is interesting; a fun quiz is to ask yourself which American states do or do not fit the pattern.)

Then Zipf is dropped abruptly in favor of discussion of Gaussian distributions, where he makes the one categorical conclusion (quoted above) that I could find in the chapter. Then more bouncing around.

The chapter closes on two tangents. The penultimate paragraph starts with “I have long been curious about the world record; the most productive single oil well”. The final paragraph: “We are left with an ‘honor roll’ of wells larger than 100,000 barrels per day. Notice that any one of these wells would generate a cash flow larger than the gross national product of some United Nations countries.” Huh? What does that have to do with anything? Is that any way to end your train of thought? Like I said, I read and reread the chapter before finally realizing that Deffeyes is just rambling and not putting together anything like a coherent narrative.

And the whole book is like that. Any paragraph in isolation is generally fine, but the dots aren’t connected, and key assumptions are glossed over. Needless to say, it’s not a very compelling advocate for the peak oil case. And this guy is a professor at freaking Princeton. I don’t want to dismiss either peak oil or his arguments out of hand, but come on, you have to try harder than that.

Some scattered notes and observations:

It is a little sobering to see how early on most oil fields were discovered. Oil was discovered on the Alaskan Arctic slope in 1923. And technology – the “oil window” is between 7000 and 15,000 feet below the surface. The first rig that could drill 15,000 feet was developed by 1938. Economics – supposedly as the price of oil increases, there is more exploration and consequently more discovery. Consider this: the peak year for oil discovery in the U.S. was in the 1930’s, when we were in the middle of the Great Depression and oil was dirt cheap.

Some people have argued against Hubbert’s methodology saying it doesn’t track U.S. production after the peak in the early 1970’s. Deffeyes protests this, saying that the methodology takes the total amount of the oil in the ground (including undiscovered reserves) as an input. Hubbert’s predictions were off because his estimates of reserves were incorrect, not because the methodology was bad.

Well . . . ok, I guess I can buy that, but like I suggested before, if the method depends on knowing the total amount of oil, then knowing the method is a lot less important than having an accurate estimate of reserves. Deffeyes coverage of that is weak.

Last paragraph of Chapter 7. “This much is certain: no initiative put in place starting today can have a substantial effect on the peak production year. No Caspian Sea exploration, no drilling in the South China Sea, no SUV replacements, no renewable energy projects can be brought on at a sufficient rate to avoid a bidding war for the remaining oil.”

Well, that last sentence is true enough, but then as the economists would put it, there always has been and always will be a bidding war for the remaining oil. As for the first sentence: really? Are you saying that if the world shifted its priorities on a dime, and focused its massive attention and resources solely on oil exploration and improved means of extraction, then there would be no impact on the oil production curve? I find that hard to believe.

In summary – I can’t tell from this book if the peak oil case is weak, or if Deffeyes is simply ineffective at presenting it. The book itself, while it probably has solid technical sections (not totally sure because I’m not qualified to judge), is a mess in terms of presenting coherent lines of thought. Deffeyes is scornful towards the economists, and I don’t always trust them either, but they sure argue their case better.

When I don’t understand someone’s case, I always wonder if it’s because of my limitations, or if it’s the presentation of the case, or the case itself. I think here it’s the middle option.

Score One for the Amish

I haven’t really been following the awful school shooting in Pennsylvania, but I did read today that the community had decided that some of the money of the charity fund that is being raised for the survivors and relatives should go to the widow of the killer and her children. Bravo for them. It’s a generous, and healthy, way of dealing with tragedy.

I think back to the parents of the victims at Columbine. Some of them reacted in a much more typically middle-class American way, by suing the schools, the police and other government agencies, and the families of the killers. And I thought that was so unfortunate, because, whether merited or not, those efforts were bound to be fruitless. Nothing in the world was going to bring those children back, and lawsuits and the like were only going to keep the wounds open for years to come.

It’s certainly not my place to tell people how to feel, not least when I haven’t walked in their shoes (fortunately). I do hope that when my time comes to grieve, I can keep my heart open a little, and remember that other people suffer too. Nobody has a monopoly on suffering, and sometimes it’s realizing that fact that can help us through.

Hubbert’s Method

Last week, I read Hubbert’s Peak, by Kenneth Deffeyes. There he gives a more detailed description of the methods Hubbert used to predict the U.S. oil production peak. That was good to read; I was missing a key piece of the puzzle when I was looking at Hubbert’s work earlier.

Deffeyes’ text is a bit flighty, so I’m still not sure I have it right. I should probably see if there’s a good synopsis on the web. But here goes.

Hubbert used two methods. The first presumed a bell-shaped (albeit the exact form was open) curve for production and required as input the total amount of oil reserves in the ground. The latter was the piece I missed. As such, Hubbert had to hold off on making his prediction until he could make a good guess as to how much undiscovered oil the U.S. had.

The second method involved noting that if you plot cumulative production and cumulative discovery versus the year on the same graph, the curves are parallel. For the U.S. data, there is a lag of about eleven years. In other words, the total amount of oil sucked out of the ground up to year Y equals the total amount of oil discovered by year Y - 11. So once discoveries peak, you can expect production to peak eleven years later.

As such, both methods sound plausible to an amateur like myself, but it looks like they have limited use for future predictions, since they require predicting future oil discoveries – wherein the rub has lain all this time.

Deffeyes uses the first method to predict the global oil peak. To do this, he needs to predict the total amount of undiscovered oil reserves in the world. He uses Colin Campbell’s estimates of 1.8 trillion barrels, and predicts a peak in 2003 (the book was published in 2001).

I have to admit, I’m underwhelmed by the predictive power of Hubbert’s theories. Maybe I’m still missing things, and just don’t get it. But it seems to me like the crux of the issue all along has been “how much oil is left”, and Hubbert’s theories don’t address that at all. The other issue of importance for the peak oil crowd is the shape of the production curve on the post-peak side. Hubbert does predict that relatively precisely, but there I have less confidence in the theory because I’m not sure there’s enough real-world data to back it up. It sounds like Hubbert based his assumption of symmetry about the peak from looking at historical data from individual oil fields. That’s reasonable, but I can see technological or market changes affecting the declining production curve. For example, with better technology we can suck oil fields dry faster; that argues against symmetry.

Deffeyes makes an interesting comment: “I have never known anyone to switch sides as a result of an intellectual analysis of Hubbert’s methods.” Strange thing to say about a scientific “theory”. To me, that’s another way of saying that Hubbert’s methods don’t address the real issues (or that they are outright faulty).

So I’m really skeptical; not that oil will peak someday, but that Hubbert’s methods are particularly useful. But like I said, I might still be missing something.