Twenty five years ago I was working with Texan rig brokers to export innovative horizontal drilling. Today I notice tremendous headway:

The average conventional gas well produces about 250,000 cubic feet of gas a day.

By inserting virtually unlimited horizontal shafts into a single gas well, multistage hydraulic fracturing technology is delivering initial rates up to 11 million cubic feet per day.

Just what we need. More fossil fumes.

The wheel has already turned from the habit of fossil imports though it will be a long time before we can keep dollars at home. Current activity is now very much NorAm as extractive teams get funded again. This is the short- to mid-term and while we eagerly await sensible juice that won’t kill us, there’s no other choice I’m guessing.

Years ago one of my mentors said “old men do what young men think there’s not enough time for”.

I’m working on horizon energy technology that (likely) will take its part among an utter turnaround in the way we produce energy, extracting various gases and liquids from the bio-layer rather than pulling it up from dangerous carbon storage. But years go by…

In the meantime, this is a hot economy even in a dip, with exponential demands from several corners. There are top folks working very hard to increase production efficiencies.

Gore Vidal digs very much truth:

So let me mention the real issue. The real issue is class.

We have the greatest divide between the very rich and the very poor of any country on Earth, surpassing even France. And this division gets wider and wider as financial disasters overwhelm us. We were already in pretty bad shape before things began to fall apart a year or two ago.

We must acknowledge that our character, never much good in these matters, is now reprehensible, and the police seem to have taken it upon themselves to exact revenge for a full professor and his—plainly, in their view—insulting income, which they figure must be considerable.

The days of greed through which we all lived now have not done us much good, nor have they taught us any lessons, but you cannot live long with such divisions, which in my view as an outsider overlooking the scene seems to be a nation of total liars. Everybody is lying. Television lies, candidates lie. And everyone says, “Oh they always have.” I love that excuse.

Well they haven’t always done that. Sometimes lying to the people is a great mistake. And it is well-known that the rich will tell almost any lie to avoid paying taxes.

Where the ocean and the atmosphere interact is a thin thin very very thin new ecosystem.

1. The top hundredth inch of the ocean is chemically distinct.

2. The top hundredth-inch of the ocean is like a sheet of jelly.
3. The top hundredth-inch is an odd habitat thinner than a human hair.

The research ship Kilo Moana and it’s robotic skimmers are back to port.

Scientists have learned that the top .25mm of the ocean is an ecosystem all its own – a special kind of habitat for microbes that act as a biological pump, a critical gas membrane and primary food web.

“It’s the ocean breathing through its skin.” [nytimesWall]

Bacteria within the biofilm play a key role in controlling greenhouse gases and our nitrogen cycle among other things. The lively boundary layer has a rich food supply of sticky carbohydrates in a broth of dissolved carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and amino acids which enable vast microbial respiration across the globe. [pdf]

There’s much to learn about the sea-surface microlayer; this ‘layer of sudden change‘.

/rant/
The ocean’s gelatinous gas-managing biofilm is strong enough to withstand typical winds, whitecaps, downwelling and bubble swarms.

But pollution?

Tests show microbe-destroying chlorine and surfactants penetrating via the water column. And of course, dioxins and PCBs, our standby poisons. Plus polybrominated diphenyl ethers already leaching from e-waste. Plus our typical sampling of ibuprofen and mood drugs, the silly kitchen-and-bath bug killer triclosan…. Not to overlook the average blend of hydrocarbons and toxic dust.

One day I hope we manage our crushing industrial detritus along with the retail silt that has spread so far so deep so high we now call it micropollution.

Fixing Earth is not a burden, but an era of opportunity and good sense.
/end rant/

Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research

the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field

Amsterdam throws a shoe at the Fox channel line up. Facts are undeniable. For cable news, not so much.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTPsFIsxM3w&hl=en&fs=1&]

Then Sarah came to the podium to give her valedictory.

She warmed up with a remark about sunny Fairbanks and how some of the most patriotic people and some of the strongest supporters of our military live here. That sparked the crowd, ready for Pure Palin.

She spoke about Denali, the mountain, and our famous cold and how it splits up the Cheechakos (newcomers) from the Sourdoughs (old timers), then launched into one of those roaring run-on sentence speeches about “merciless rivers rushing and carving and reminding us here Mother Nature wins and the rest of America sees in the Last Frontier hope and opportunity and country pride and it is our men and women in uniform securing it and we are facing tough challenges in America with some being just hellbent on tearing down our nation, perpetuating some pessimism, and suggesting American apologetics, suggesting that our best days were yesterdays, but as other people have asked, how can that pessimism be when proof of our greatness and our pride today is that we produce the great proud volunteers who sacrifice everything for country”.

“What you get to see everyday and North to the Future and our brave military and by God’s Grace and I promised to be fiscally restrained and hold schools accountable and elevate vo-tech training and manage our fish and wildlife and defend the Constitution and those Outside special interest groups still just don’t get it and you see I know that it is your money and you know best how to spend it.”

Bill O’Reilly:

Higher Canadian Life Expectancy “To Be Expected” Because “We Have 10 Times As Many People”

Moving to renewables is a lengthy process.
The work of a generation at least, and smart.

Jeff Goodell, author of ‘Big Coal’:
“The biggest problem with our bounty of coal is not what it does to our mountains or the atmosphere, but what it does to our minds.

“It preserves the illusion that we don’t have to change our lives. Given the profound challenges we face with the end of cheap oil and the arrival of global warming, this is a dangerous fantasy.

“If we had less coal, we might replace the 19th-century notion that we can drill and burn our way to prosperity with a more modern view of efficiency and sustainability.

“Instead of spending billions of dollars each year to subsidize tapping out yet another finite resource, we’d pour that money into solar energy, biofuels and other renewable resources.

“We’d be creating jobs in new industries, not protecting them in old ones. And we’d understand that the real fuel of the future is not coal but creativity.”

The EPA has refused hundreds of new permits, not to protect a mountain nor to divert carbon, but because 100s of miles of waterways are being destroyed.

Mines have demolished 500 mountains — about a million acres — buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region’s air and water.

Stanley Fish:

I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.

As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.

The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?

The proposal:

National Financial Literacy Centers

1) These centers would provide a basic financial skills curriculum plus additional classes covering specific topics such as investing in stocks, bonds or real estate or home ownership.

2) Teachers for these classes could be retired volunteers or unemployed college students or unemployed financial industry people.

3) Credit unions would be the ideal partner in this public-private partnership because of their membership structure and not-for-profit status.

My name is Gary and I’m a workaholic.

When my wife left 20 years ago this month she accused me of being a workaholic, of needing to work like a drug addict needs a fix, and that this was a form of spousal abuse. I denied it at the time and made excuses for my behavior, but she was right.

Manage your military position like water. Water takes every shape. It avoids the high and moves to the low. Your war can take any shape. It must avoid the strong and strike the weak. Water follows the shape of the land that directs its flow. Your forces follow the enemy, who determines how you win. ~Sun Tzu, The Art of War

For Misha Glenny, it’s one of the greatest commercial success stories.

Criminal activity now accounts for over 15 percent of the world’s GDP. In the last two decades, it has experienced massive growth.

For Fred Leland, it’s developing operational art.

To get the best results and win we must learn what we need to know about conflict and violence, how it unfolds, its causes and effects and its signs and signals… we must develop knowledge of conflict and violence in its three dimensions, the moral and the mental as well as the physical.

For Adam Elkus, it’s Forecasting Future Slaughter:

Heavy force or light? Counterinsurgency or conventional warfighting? Airpower or ground pounders? Current strategic debate is marked by dispute over what lessons should be drawn from Iraq and Afghanistan and what kind of force structure should be employed in future warfare.

For Loretta Napoleoni, it’s way beyond the headlines.

They were constantly searching for cash.

Terrorism is actually a very expensive business — arms, vehicles, explosives. If you live underground, it’s very hard to produce this amount of money. Most people were extremely reluctant to talk about politics, because they had no ideas. The ideology is decided by leadership of a terrorist organization, all the others do is search for money.

She found in terrorism a parallel economy, that had been around since the close of World War II. It has followed step by step the trends common to any other economy.

She sets out to prove that groups labeled terrorist organizations or liberation movements have shown the same skills as any Wall Street investor in channeling assets into legal structures and businesses in pursuit of their broader goals. At the same time, armed groups are financing their activities through drug-running, illicit diamond sales, car theft, credit card fraud or arms dealing using the Western financial system to launder their income.

She says that, since the 1960s, a growing number of dollars have been leaving the US never to come back. This is money taken out by criminals and money launderers to fund the growth of terror and criminal economies.

You’ve got to question everything that is told to you, including what I told you. It will be scary and frightening but it will enlighten you and above all its not going to be boring.

For John Robb, it’s “searching for global systempunkts”.

What sort of chemicals are released by humans under great stress?

We’re looking for volunteers to lie down in our enclosed space.

Participants are provided just enough air, temperature and humidity to support life.

Our aim is to analyze the human chemical profile over 24 hours as if they were trapped under a collapsed building.

Pending ethical approval, we’re hoping to begin these trials by the end of the year.

Over and over again, the arrogance and trickiness astounds me.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorized the secretary of energy to make loan guarantees to qualified renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.

It was supposed to add a much needed public boost to the development of U.S. renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies, as well as to the economy.

Instead, the Department of Energy sat on billions of dollars.

Companies applying for the loans spent as much as $10 million on the process and waited as long as three years for a loan guarantee without a single one being granted by the Bush administration.

No longer shortsighted, DOE is facing marching orders from the White House.

How does that affect your strategic planning?

I guess the easiest answer is to say it’s a lot easier for a biofuel company to raise money when crude is $140 per barrel than when it drops down to $40. What we’re really trying to do as an industry is to say, ‘You know, we want to disconnect from a commodity called crude oil and establish a new commodity called energy from biomass.’

If crude oil stays at $40 forever all these technologies will only work with a significant amount of policy support that will be driven by job-creation, energy security, and I think to a lesser extent environmental concerns.

There needs to be some understanding that we’re really trying to make this shift from a crude oil-driven economy to a biomass-driven economy.

Sustainability wants the supermarket to be more energy efficient, while resilience questions depending on the supermarket. – Rob Hopkins at TED