01-06-2010, 10:11 AM
May 31 2010:
9,000 days and a dying economy
Quiet day on the markets, US closed, Britain closed, Europe, Asia and the Euro hardly budging, and all the real action taking place below ground in more ways than one. Bad news from China keeps getting louder, but may still have a ways to go before it makes real headlines. Increasing pressure on Spain, but that too may take a while yet to come to fruition. Spain is not Greece. Even from a purely economical view, the most relevant issue is the Gulf of Mexico, if only because its aftershocks could be strong enough to shake and rattle global economies to an extent no-one seems willing to talk about as of yet.
The five affected US Golf states alone have, between them, a $2.2 trillion economy. Cut that in half, which could easily happen if there’s oil all over the place, and you have a nationwide economic disaster, coming on top of everything else. Throw in a hurricane, or two, or ten, and see where you get from there. How about if 50% or more of Florida's tourist industry is wiped out, or if beach side properties there lose another 50% or more of their value due to tar balls forcing beach closures? How about Georgia, the Carolinas, how about closing Chesapeake Bay as well as Galveston Bay? Alarmist? Maybe, then there’s no end in sight to the spill.
And that too is just the start. There’s a serious threat that the entire Mississippi watershed and river will have to be closed for -much of its- traffic. You can’t have a zillion ships a day drag oil residue all the way up to St. Louis or beyond. Oil is sort of toxic. If it would come to that, the US have a real serious problem.
Anyone still wish to argue that the BP/Macondo/Deepwater Horizon karbunkle is not a disaster? Or that it isn't one for president Obama? After the Top Kill failure (was that ever a serious attempt in the first place? how hard is it to gauge upward vs downward pressure?), there’ll apparently be another brilliantly engineered $multi-million inverted flowerpot theater-piece later this week, but now that we're down to the next in line ever less likely to succeed genius ideas, maybe it’s time to see what for instance the bookies are offering.
After all, they usually have their finger on the pulse of reality much more than politicians or corporations with skin in the game. Or are we down to the lucky 13th failed attempt yet, our best option to date? Someone grab me some clover, horse-shoes, rabbit's feet.
Remember, Matt Simmons, banker to the oil industry and writer of several highly insightful books on black gold, recently warned that it may take 9000 days, or 24 years, before the first oil leak to threaten a US presidency will stop a-gushin’-and-a-flowin’. Simmons has little faith in the litany of maybe-solutions we’ve seen so far and will see going forward. Yeah, there’s talk of detonating a nuclear bomb, but let’s get real, it’s never been tried at these depths, and it’s a crap shot to begin with. What exactly do you risk unleashing?
The people in the swamps, the wetlands and the bayous were never the richest in the world, or even the country, but they had an abundance of natural beauty around them to make up for it. That’s now gone too, for decades to come. It’s impossible to say when Louisiana will recover from this latest blow, but it may very well indeed take those 9000 days, and likely more. Incidentally, so may the lawsuits.
The only thing that will help BP as a going concern retain some of its value is that Exxon and Shell are both eager for a take-over, while China will certainly be looking at the ruins of the company. Then again, for all interested parties the threat of never-ending and extremely expensive legal cases, bot civil and criminal, may be a deterrent that will not be overcome. The British government will try what it can to save the firm, but even they will find they've bigger fish-and-chips to fry. The challenge will be to separate BP's assets from its pending legal claims. A few laws may have to be changed in order to accommodate that one.
When the oil reaches Florida, Georgia, Mexico and Cuba, and it will, every US and UK politician will attempt to wash their hands clean of oil in any shape or form, the president first of all. We’re all still caught in a mid-air suspension moment built on hope that the oil will magically disappear, but that’s not very clever. What we should do is imagine where a Katrina-size hurricane can deliver the stuff. That and the normal loop- and Gulf Stream currents.
So what should both the US and UK governments have done 40 days and change ago? It's simple, really. They should have immediately declared everything they could an emergency zone, situation, whatever, anything in their power. In the US, Homeland Security would have been the number 1 agency to turn to. But they’re probably too occupied with Arab Americans tying their shoelaces in airports.
It’s downright foolish to underestimate the potential damage from an all-out leak over one mile below sea-level, and if you believe it takes platoons of specialists to come to that assessment, I’d direct you to what I wrote right after April 20, and have written since.
Now, I’m not an oil expert, but I do know when things smell too much to ignore. There was and is no-one who could have guaranteed on April 20 that we would find ourselves where we are now, 41 days later, but that’s not the point. What is, is that even people like me could see way back when that the risk was there that we would end up here. And that’s all a president or prime minister should need. When it comes to these matters, the only option is to be better safe than sorry, at least and certainly when you’re in charge of an entire nation. Gambling on anything else, or better, is quite simply not in your job profile. It can’t be, for where would that leave the nation? That’s right, where we are today.
The argument that the White House didn’t and doesn’t have the expertise to intervene in issues such as Deepwater Horizon is ludicrous. If Obama would have, as he should have, declared it a national emergency on April 20, all the best resources, the best people, the best material, on the whole wide planet, would have been available right from the get-go, not just the resources of BP, which has always had a vested interest into downplaying every single aspect of this boondoggle. Unfortunately for every party involved, with the possible exception of BP, governments consciously and deliberately choose and chose to be asleep on both sides on the Atlantic.
And this one looks to be the one that’ll bite them in the rearguard. No more BP, no more Obama, and, much more importantly, no more fishermen and tourist outlets on the Louisiana coast for a long time to come, plus a giant threat to shipping on the Mississippi. And that’s still only the human cost. Do dead dolphins count for anything at all around here?
Could the president have prevented the calamity? Probably not. But that's not the point. The point is he never really tried. He, intentionally or accidentally, misread the situation to a huge degree, one that he can never have back, no matter what his spin team comes up with. The economics behind the karbunkle will tell the tale.
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/20...onomy.html
9,000 days and a dying economy
Quiet day on the markets, US closed, Britain closed, Europe, Asia and the Euro hardly budging, and all the real action taking place below ground in more ways than one. Bad news from China keeps getting louder, but may still have a ways to go before it makes real headlines. Increasing pressure on Spain, but that too may take a while yet to come to fruition. Spain is not Greece. Even from a purely economical view, the most relevant issue is the Gulf of Mexico, if only because its aftershocks could be strong enough to shake and rattle global economies to an extent no-one seems willing to talk about as of yet.
The five affected US Golf states alone have, between them, a $2.2 trillion economy. Cut that in half, which could easily happen if there’s oil all over the place, and you have a nationwide economic disaster, coming on top of everything else. Throw in a hurricane, or two, or ten, and see where you get from there. How about if 50% or more of Florida's tourist industry is wiped out, or if beach side properties there lose another 50% or more of their value due to tar balls forcing beach closures? How about Georgia, the Carolinas, how about closing Chesapeake Bay as well as Galveston Bay? Alarmist? Maybe, then there’s no end in sight to the spill.
And that too is just the start. There’s a serious threat that the entire Mississippi watershed and river will have to be closed for -much of its- traffic. You can’t have a zillion ships a day drag oil residue all the way up to St. Louis or beyond. Oil is sort of toxic. If it would come to that, the US have a real serious problem.
Anyone still wish to argue that the BP/Macondo/Deepwater Horizon karbunkle is not a disaster? Or that it isn't one for president Obama? After the Top Kill failure (was that ever a serious attempt in the first place? how hard is it to gauge upward vs downward pressure?), there’ll apparently be another brilliantly engineered $multi-million inverted flowerpot theater-piece later this week, but now that we're down to the next in line ever less likely to succeed genius ideas, maybe it’s time to see what for instance the bookies are offering.
After all, they usually have their finger on the pulse of reality much more than politicians or corporations with skin in the game. Or are we down to the lucky 13th failed attempt yet, our best option to date? Someone grab me some clover, horse-shoes, rabbit's feet.
Remember, Matt Simmons, banker to the oil industry and writer of several highly insightful books on black gold, recently warned that it may take 9000 days, or 24 years, before the first oil leak to threaten a US presidency will stop a-gushin’-and-a-flowin’. Simmons has little faith in the litany of maybe-solutions we’ve seen so far and will see going forward. Yeah, there’s talk of detonating a nuclear bomb, but let’s get real, it’s never been tried at these depths, and it’s a crap shot to begin with. What exactly do you risk unleashing?
The people in the swamps, the wetlands and the bayous were never the richest in the world, or even the country, but they had an abundance of natural beauty around them to make up for it. That’s now gone too, for decades to come. It’s impossible to say when Louisiana will recover from this latest blow, but it may very well indeed take those 9000 days, and likely more. Incidentally, so may the lawsuits.
The only thing that will help BP as a going concern retain some of its value is that Exxon and Shell are both eager for a take-over, while China will certainly be looking at the ruins of the company. Then again, for all interested parties the threat of never-ending and extremely expensive legal cases, bot civil and criminal, may be a deterrent that will not be overcome. The British government will try what it can to save the firm, but even they will find they've bigger fish-and-chips to fry. The challenge will be to separate BP's assets from its pending legal claims. A few laws may have to be changed in order to accommodate that one.
When the oil reaches Florida, Georgia, Mexico and Cuba, and it will, every US and UK politician will attempt to wash their hands clean of oil in any shape or form, the president first of all. We’re all still caught in a mid-air suspension moment built on hope that the oil will magically disappear, but that’s not very clever. What we should do is imagine where a Katrina-size hurricane can deliver the stuff. That and the normal loop- and Gulf Stream currents.
So what should both the US and UK governments have done 40 days and change ago? It's simple, really. They should have immediately declared everything they could an emergency zone, situation, whatever, anything in their power. In the US, Homeland Security would have been the number 1 agency to turn to. But they’re probably too occupied with Arab Americans tying their shoelaces in airports.
It’s downright foolish to underestimate the potential damage from an all-out leak over one mile below sea-level, and if you believe it takes platoons of specialists to come to that assessment, I’d direct you to what I wrote right after April 20, and have written since.
Now, I’m not an oil expert, but I do know when things smell too much to ignore. There was and is no-one who could have guaranteed on April 20 that we would find ourselves where we are now, 41 days later, but that’s not the point. What is, is that even people like me could see way back when that the risk was there that we would end up here. And that’s all a president or prime minister should need. When it comes to these matters, the only option is to be better safe than sorry, at least and certainly when you’re in charge of an entire nation. Gambling on anything else, or better, is quite simply not in your job profile. It can’t be, for where would that leave the nation? That’s right, where we are today.
The argument that the White House didn’t and doesn’t have the expertise to intervene in issues such as Deepwater Horizon is ludicrous. If Obama would have, as he should have, declared it a national emergency on April 20, all the best resources, the best people, the best material, on the whole wide planet, would have been available right from the get-go, not just the resources of BP, which has always had a vested interest into downplaying every single aspect of this boondoggle. Unfortunately for every party involved, with the possible exception of BP, governments consciously and deliberately choose and chose to be asleep on both sides on the Atlantic.
And this one looks to be the one that’ll bite them in the rearguard. No more BP, no more Obama, and, much more importantly, no more fishermen and tourist outlets on the Louisiana coast for a long time to come, plus a giant threat to shipping on the Mississippi. And that’s still only the human cost. Do dead dolphins count for anything at all around here?
Could the president have prevented the calamity? Probably not. But that's not the point. The point is he never really tried. He, intentionally or accidentally, misread the situation to a huge degree, one that he can never have back, no matter what his spin team comes up with. The economics behind the karbunkle will tell the tale.
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/20...onomy.html
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"