Those Baffling Oil Prices

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spot oil pricesOil prices have dropped a bit of late. Spot prices for crude are down ten bucks from their peak two weeks ago. One reason? The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, according to This Week in Petroleum:

Still another factor behind the recent decline in oil prices is a lessening of geopolitical tensions. Following the release of the latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which stated with moderate confidence that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, oil market analysts have been less concerned about a possible disruption to Iranian oil exports in the near future.

On Voluntary Conservation

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From North Carolina, word that residents are not really all that altruistic and require some sort of pricing structure to help them understand that they’re in a frickin’ drought:

Less than two months ago, Gov. Mike Easley urged all North Carolina communities to reduce water consumption by 50 percent. After showing marked declines in the weeks immediately after the governor’s challenge, Triangle utilities are now seeing the limits of short-term conservation measures.

“We have gotten most of the stuff that can be gotten by behavior change,” said Bill Holman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. “If we’re going to make additional gains, it’s going to involve policy, pricing and technology.”

(via John Whitehead)

Is India’s Monsoon Declining?

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Indian farmerFrom K. V. Ramesh and P. Goswami last week in Geophysical Research Letters, evidence that India’s monsoon, bringer of the rains to feed the farmers who feed the residents of one of the world’s largest nations, may be in decline:

We show here, based on an analysis of daily gridded observed rainfall data for the period 1951–2003, that there are decreasing trends in both early and late monsoon rainfall and number of rainy days, implying a shorter monsoon over India….

The results emphasize need for careful regional analysis in drawing conclusions regarding agro-ecological sustainability in a changing climate.

Waalpi, Circa 1947

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Walpi, Circa 1947

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

This is from one of Dad’s old sketchbooks, which he gave me recently. It is not possible to adequately describe the importance his art has for me. It’s my whole visual language – the smell of oil paint and those remarkable paintings I stared at as a child, before I had words and experience to describe and understand what I was seeing.

I’ve long been interested in those moments when everything changes, and this sketchbook is a remarkable document in Dad’s artistic evolution. He was a Pennsylvania boy who saw The West as a young soldier and returned after the war. This sketchbook in part documents that return, and the resulting transition from an artist interested in the foreground to the artist I grew up with, interested in the great spaces of the West and the colors that inhabit them. To see it happening first hand its to have the privilege of traveling back to a time before I was born and glimpsing Dad’s artistic mind.

And Then It Rained

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Malcolm on the rains in Australia. The blessings of La Nina?

Fortunately, things have definitely improved. The latest weekly report from the Catchmtent Authority shows that we have remained above 55% capacity for a couple months now and it is even ticking up slightly of late. The next mark of interest is 70%, which is considered fairly comfortable levels (100% being both obviously better and achievable — we were at 100% capacity back in 1998) for the future of the city’s supply.

Beginnings

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I have always held a certain ambivalence toward my nation’s national anthem. For my parents’ generation, having participated in a war for our nation’s survival, it is a deep and important talisman. But to my generation, its theme (war) places it at the center of an unresolved struggle, making it an uncomfortable national icon. It’s not entirely clear what we’re celebrating when we stand respectfully at the start of baseball games, but the ritual has always made me uncomfortable.

Yesterday on the radio, though, I heard the most remarkable and stirring version of the song. Performance Today, the wonderful classical music program on public radio, set it up thus: A tape of a radio announcer telling his audience that the New York Philharmonic’s regular conductor was ill, and the orchestra would be led that day by his assistant, Leonard Bernstein. It was November 1943, the darkest heart of the war, and we were hearing the debut of that most American of artists, leading the Philharmonic in the National Anthem. You can hear the audience singing along – badly, as audiences always do, lagging the orchestra slightly, but there’s an energy to the thing that is palpable, as if the singing of this song matters in a way that my generation could not possibly understand.

To listen: Performance Today – click on Hour 1 at the top of the page, the segment starts at 14 minutes in

Dave Finds The Solution Space

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Regular Inkstain readers will no doubt be aware of my ongoing search for “the solution space” – public policy options that unite those with disparate views in search of solutions to thorny problems that can actually be implemented – that are robust to underlying political disagreements.

My friend Dave is pushing something in this regard that is both innovative and brilliant – starting at the local level, a bottom-up initiative to unite concerns that are both international and genuinely local:

I’d like to call on the Carrboro Town Council to ban waterboarding in Carrboro. We simply can’t have that kind of water wasting going on with this drought. No water for lawns, no water for suspected terrorists.

More on this win-win synergy here.

The Adaptation Discussion

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Daniel Hall, drawing in part on the excellent reporting of Peter Spotts in the Christian Science Monitor, had a nice post today about pressure on the developed world to adapt to climate change, and on the mechanisms to pay for it:

U.S. CO2 emissions are around 6 billion metric tons per year.  If permit prices were around $20 per metric ton — a not unreasonable guess based on modeling work of other similar bills by the EIA — and all permits were auctioned the government would raise more than $100 billion a year.  I think the bill actually auctions around one-quarter of permits initially, so this might be more like $25 or $30 billion a year early on in the program.  Either way, there is certainly a ready and sufficient source for adaption funding; the question then is whether wealthy countries are truly willing to write the checks.