The Coming Natural Gas Price Train Wreck

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Natural gas prices don’t have the “big sign on every corner” public awareness, but they’re up big time too, according to the EIA:

Current prices in all parts of country exceed historical records for this time of year, when moderate temperatures lead to significantly lower aggregate demand and result in additional supplies injected into storage for later in the year.

Imported liquid natural gas was supposed to be the fix for that, but the LNG thing isn’t going so well, according to an article by Clifford Krauss in today’s New York Times:

Only a month after Cheniere Energy inaugurated its $1.4 billion liquefied natural gas terminal here, an empty supertanker sat in its berth with no place to go while workers painted empty storage tanks.

The nearly idle terminal is a monument to a stalled experiment, one that was supposed to import so much L.N.G. from around the world that homes would be heated and factories humming at bargain prices.

A Good Use of a Few Minutes of Your Time

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If you love science, have a subscription or library access to Science magazine, and happen to have a few minutes to spare, I can think of few better ways to spend it than with Kerry Emanuel’s obituary of Edward Lorenz:

Chaos is not merely about the practical problem of prediction. Lorenz and others showed that there are mathematical (and almost certainly physical) systems for which the predictability horizon–the time limit over which a prediction can be made–approaches a finite limit as the initial error approaches zero. Such systems are formally unpredictable beyond this finite horizon, no matter how precise the computation and the specification of the initial state. Even the motion of a frictionless billiard ball becomes completely unpredictable after only 11 collisions, owing to the uncertainty principle’s limit on describing its initial state.

On Jumping to Conclusions

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Looks like I drew an improper inference in my post earlier today about the Clovis yearbook advisor:

A Clovis High School teacher is no longer the adviser to the yearbook, which this year came under fire for photos and interviews with gay couples.

School officials say teacher Carol Singletary announced her decision before the controversy (emphasis added).

Diesel Price Tag Bites

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I don’t think any of you will be surprised that, with diesel at $4.72 a gallon, truckers are hurting. From this morning’s New York Times:

If diesel prices do not decline and make that side of the business viable, Mr. Hendley says, he will have to sell his trucks, or try to sell them. That is just what thousands of other truckers are doing as they shed used rigs in what appears to be the biggest shakeout since trucking was deregulated in 1980.

“Most truckers are one major breakdown — a broken axle or a damaged engine — away from bankruptcy,” said Mr. Hendley, who laid off his last driver this month and turned to independent operators to ship his logs.