This is awesome!!! We found oil!! Er....how do we get to it?

Brazil stunned the oil world when it announced the discovery of a vast oil field 200 miles south of Rio de Janeiro last November, turning the country’s deep blue waters into the world’s most exciting oil frontier. Energy experts said the field could turn out to be just a small part of the largest oil discovery in 30 years.

But seven months later, the problem is still how to retrieve it. Petrobras has only three rigs capable of drilling in waters that exceed 6,500 feet, like the sites of the new fields.

More.

NVDL: Too few ships. Too little time.

Midwest Floods, a Broad Threat to Crops

“The American farmer, we feed the world,” Mr. Timmerman said. “We’re going to be short on corn and we’re going to be short on soybeans.”
Beyond that, agriculture experts estimate that 2 million acres of soy beans have been lost to water, putting the state’s total grain loss at 20 percent so far, with the threat of more rain to come.

NEWHALL, Iowa — Here, in some of the best soil in the world, the stunted stalks of Dave Timmerman’s newly planted corn are wilting in what sometimes look more like rice paddies than the plains, the sunshine glinting off of pools of collected water. Although time is running out, he has yet to plant all of his soybean crop because the waterlogged soil cannot support his footsteps, much less heavy machinery.

Interview With Dave Timmerman, an Iowa Farmer (mp3)

Enlarge This Image

Stephen Mally for The New York Times

Corn rose just above the water standing in a field near Newhall, Iowa, at a time when the stalks should be several feet high.

Mr. Timmerman’s small farm has been flooded four times in the past month by the Wildcat Creek, a tributary of the Cedar River which overflowed its banks at a record 31 feet last week, causing catastrophic damage in nearby Cedar Rapids and other eastern Iowa towns and farmsteads.

“In the lean years, we had beautiful crops but they weren’t worth much,” Mr. Timmerman said, surveying his farm, which his family has tended since his great-great-grandfather. “Now, with commodity prices sky high, mother nature is throwing us all these curve balls. I’m 42 years old and these are by far the poorest crops I’ve ever seen.”

And he added, “It’s going downhill by the day.”

By SUSAN SAULNY
More.

NVDL: Everyone together: "Gasp - It couldn't be global warming could it!"

The Slippery Slope: Life just got a lot more expensive

So tonight the price of petrol in South Africa goes up 50 cents. Let's put just tonight's price rise into perspective. For every 2 litres of petrol you put into your tank, you pay an extra R1. So if you put 50 litres of petrol in your car, you've basically bought an extra movie ticket, or a hamburger, with the extra cash - except of course you never get to watch the movie, or eat the hamburger. And this happens every time you fill up from tonight onwards.

On SABC TV news the fuel price hike was the top story. There is a lot of concern about the impact, with economists citing long haul trucking companies and bus companies starting to struggle. Plenty more is on the cards - airlines for one, supermarkets for another. Then, 10 minutes later into the bulletin, car makers start whining about declining production. The stats show year on year figures declining from 50 000 units a month, to 30-something thousand. However, they say, export volumes are still growing, and are now at 23 000 units a month? Errrrr...I wonder how many people have any idea how incredibly stupid the psychology is here. We don't like the fuel prices going up, and now we're not happy because we can't make more cars. Can anyone be any more cluelessand disconnected to reality?

The fuel price is going up - oh no, why, anger. Then - production in car volumes is going up - oh no, why, anger. I'd really like to know - if SA produces 50 000 units - that's cars that drink petrol - a month, how many units (that's cars that drink petrol) do other economies make, like South Korea, and Japan, and Germany, and the USA and China, and India. Every new vehicle is a new user. That's not just demand continuing as it is now, but growing demand for that new vehicle for the rest of its productive life. And of course the last thing anyone is thinking is - is it such a great idea to continue on the way we are going? I mean, are things ever likely to improve if we just continue building cars? Shall I answer the question for you? No.

I've also seen apparently intelligent journalists, economists - experts - saying that 'we can't do anything about high fuel prices'. Ordinary people say this a lot too. Bullshit. Actually, we can do a lot. Price is about supply and demand. Supply is struggling. Yet no one is starting conversations about changing our demand. Changing what you do every single day. From the ordinary things - like how far you drive to work, to car pooling, efficient driving habits (reduce speed, pump your cars tyres, take out stuff that doesn't need to be in your car) to the more extreme, such as cancelling NASCAR and Formula 1, restructuring our living arrangements (where w elive, how we live), investing in rail. You just don't hear that because everyone assumes - incorrectly - that this can somehow carry on and on. It's called wishful thinking. It's fantasy. It comes from watching too many movies and TV. It comes from a public used to getting what it wants, used to convenience, and utterly unused being told to change, being told to do something about an obvious problem.

The fact that obesity now is one of the world's chronic problems, while people are starving to death in other parts of the world, tells you how shizophrenic and sick our thinking is. It's not a normal world.

While everyone hopes that prices will magically come down, and the Antartic will start spewing oil, people just don't get that that's not going to happen. We are experiencing a major, and fundamental shift. We can adapt, or have those changes forced upon us. The question is, when do we wake up to reality?

When I drove back to Johannesburg on Sunday, at night, I got a gut feel sense about what impact oil actually has. I saw a faraway flame turning a large amount of sky around a Sasolburg chimney into sulphurous yellow daylight. The plant is designed to refine fossil fuels into stuff we can put in our cars, and burn, stuff that goes into our homes to light up our TV's and lights. It occurred to me, driving over the dark highway, that every light on every car, even the lights that show us our speed, whether we are braking, the galaxy of city lights making the sky glow a dull moony white above the city - every single light burns thanks to oil and coal pumped out of the ground, sucked and dredged out of the Earth and burned. And once it is gone, it's gone. We're burning vast amounts every day now, and every day, more and more machines line up to be marched into service.

On the highway I felt I couldn't imagine the huge cityscape of Johannesburg's lights, the long ruby snakes and glittering rows of diamonds burning this bright for much longer. And that gut feel happens to be on the money. Eskom has just announced a new load shedding schedule. And I predict that this year we will experience fuel shortages. That means the equivalent of power cuts, except we won't be able to power (run) our cars. For a few days at a time. And then a week. And then longer. It will happen this year, and if I am wrong, then I'll be glad. But it will happen eventually, and probably sooner than we think. Already experts are citing 'surprise'. The surprises have just started.

Kunstler: Feeling Good Are Ya?

...all the backward-looking crybaby complaints that "we were lied to" still does not answer the basic question: what should have been the appropriate response to the extreme injury of 9/11? A diplomatic protest? An investigation by the UN? The surreptitious assassination of Arab troublemakers all around the world? I don't think the "we were lied to" contingent has a credible answer to this question.

There's another hugely important realm of inquiry that the "we were lied to" folks have never addressed: who lied to us about the way we live in this country? About the amount of oil we consume in the service of all our comforts and conveniences? About our extreme car dependence and what is required in our relations with the rest of the world to sustain it. All these years, Frank Rich and all his whining colleagues at the New York Times barely acknowledged the domestic fiasco of the suburban sprawl economy that placed us in such jeopardy to begin with. Even now, with the airlines disintegrating and gasoline over $4 (diesel over $5) I haven't heard any of these crybabies even raise the issue of restoring the US railroad system. How many of these crybabies live suburban lives themselves, in places like Louden County, Virginia, or Westchester, or Long Island, or the San Fernando Valley? Who lied to us about that?

For my money, the "we were lied to" chorus only represents the obdurately self-righteous cluelessness in every band of the American political spectrum. We lied to ourselves. We continue to lie to ourselves every day. The US public barely understands the first thing about the energy predicament we're in, and what it means for how we live in this country -- or how we get along with the rest of the world -- and the news media tragically reflects that ignorance. We fantasize about being "energy independent" and still being able to drive to the mall three times a day to eat caesar salads grown on the other side of North America. Get this: we deserve what is exactly happening to us. We might as well keep on lying to ourselves to pretend that we are not descending into a dark time. After all, the true basis of American life these days is to feel good about yourself no matter what you do.

Kunstler: Anxious Hiatus

In the U.S., data released on Friday showed that highway miles driven in March fell 4.3 percent from a year earlier, the first time this has happened in March since the last major oil shock in 1979.

Loveliness was everywhere this holiday weekend in upstate New York, and it was probably hard for many to believe that the wayward nation would return to the dread uncertainty of life in the crash lane when the barbeques were over. There was even a wan overtone to the late-night sports news about the Indy 500 race -- as though the spectacle of cars droning round and round a speed oval symbolized the futility of American life in this moment of our history.

I had a discussion with one guy at Sunday night party about the prospects for hydrogen-powered cars. We rehearsed the usual reasons why such a system was unlikely to get up-and-running -- and then he said, "...but what if we took all the money from the war and put it into something like the space program and... they came up with some way to make it happen...!"

This is certainly the golden heart of the great wish out there, as the empire of Happy Motoring begins to run down on $4 gasoline. It seems inconceivable that a society so bold as to put men on the moon (fer crissake) can't overcome such a prosaic problem as finding something other than oil byproducts to run our cars on.
From this holy font all cognitive dissonance flows.

It seems inconceivable, but it begins to look like that's the way it really is, and we just can't accept it.
Of course, one of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape from it for a weekend.

We're at a dead end with all this and a lot of Americans are paralyzed with fear about what's next. This may actually be a deeper fear than the anxiety about money and banking in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in and tried to reassure the nation. Back then, despite the grave problems of capital, we still had plenty of everything: plenty of good productive land, plenty of manpower earnestly eager for hard work, plenty of ore in the ground, shining cities equipped with excellent streetcar systems, a railroad network that was the envy of the world, sturdy small towns and small cities fully equipped with locally-owned business, and a vast number of small family farms that could re-absorb family members unable to get wages in the cities. Most of all, we had plenty of oil in the ground, and the world's biggest industry for getting it out and selling it. What we didn't have in 1933 was cash money.

The crisis at hand now goes way beyond a crisis of capital -- though that is certainly part of it. Notice how many of the things we had in 1933 are gone now. Our cities, with a few exceptions, are imploded husks. Our small towns and small cities (Schenectady, home of G.E.!) are gutted, especially in terms of locally-owned business. Our passenger rail system is worse than anything a Soviet ministry might produce (while the airline industry that replaced it is dying of a kind of financial hemorrhagic fever). Our local transit hardly exists anymore. Family farms have all but disappeared. We have plenty of manpower earnestly eager to become American Idols (but certainly not for heavy labor). Our oil industry now supplies only a fraction of the world's daily supply (and not even enough for half of our own needs).

What happens now? We face not just change but convulsive change. The public senses the rapid unraveling of our car-centric arrangements. In the week before the holiday, gasoline prices went up several cents each day -- in upstate New York, it crossed the $4 mark and kept going up. The trucking system faces collapse as diesel fuel price-rises exceed even the rise in gasoline, and the vast number of independent truckers who make up the system confront the individual calamity of a personal business failure. American Airlines last week announced severe measures to keep operating through the fall of 2008. But none of the airlines can feasibly carry on as usual with oil prices above $120-a-barrel -- and the ominous message is of a business model that has no conceivable way to adapt to the new reality. Most likely, in a very few years air travel will no longer be a "consumer" enterprise.

In the background of these practical problems -- "off screen" during the holiday of car races and ball games -- is a crisis of capital orders of magnitude worse than the one faced by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. For, behind the "liquidity" (i.e. insolvency) issues faced by the big institutions lurks the Godzilla of the derivatives trade, which has evolved into a black hole capable of sucking all notional "money" into oblivion. That "money," which represents the aggregate value of our society, also amounts to the emperor's new clothes of an empire in serious trouble. As the black hole of derivatives sucks away these "new clothes," America will stand naked against the elements of fate.

NVDL: Whether it's summer or winter, we're heading for winter, one of the grimmest in history.

The Grim Reaper stretches his legs

The news is pretty grim - have you had a look?

China: 69 dams in danger after earthquake
South Africa immigrant violence leaves 25,000 displaced
Tornadoes rake Oklahoma as Midwest tallies damage
Fed warns on inflation as oil prices continue to rise
Bangladesh reports first human case of bird flu
Myanmar still in emergency after cyclone: UN aid
Buffett sees "long, deep" U.S. recession

In an Olympic year, China is scrambling to deal with imminent dam bursts, 80 000 estimated dead in earthquakes with continuing aftershocks, meanwhile the Olympic torch has been shelved. No one is thinking about that now.

South Africa, another country hoping to host 'world games' (the Soccer World Cup in 2010) is facing a lot more crisis than China. The xenophobia/mob violence is perhaps the most troubling. It ought to be obvious by now that if such large scale rioting can erupt with no warning, it can happen in 2010 without warning (that's if it dissipates in the interim), which is an unconscionable threat to the safety of tens of thousands of foreign visitors. Given the inflationary pressures at work, I predict that this violence and criminality will pick up speed towards 2010. South Africa also has many other troubles, including a dodgy electricity network, virtually no public transport and a deep seated corruption in government. The last may not seem to be a problem, except that government will say everything and do nothing, meaning we can't reasonably expect the country's problems to be solved any time soon.

The USA is experiencing crappy weather, and we will have to see whether we have another season of big hitting Hurricanes. While Americans are seeing the worst property market figures in 20 years, they are also facing stagflation - rising prices of goods, but zero growth. And as the world's largest consumer of energy (and largest polluter), at 25% (China consumes 9%), America is being winded by some very hard economic right hooks. The presidency is looking increasingly like a booby prize for whomever is unlucky enough to win it.

H5N1 has been placed on the back burner, but it hasn't disappeared. It's kicking around in Seoul, one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It's also dancing around Bangladesh, Japan and Indonesia.

Finally,if your country hasn't been mentioned above, the bad news still extends to you, because we are now moving fairly rapidly towards a global recession, and then a depression. We can expect oil prices to cruise to about $150 and obviously those commentators yelling 'bubble' will hopefully have their own thought bubbles popped. I had hoped for more sanity in our response to $135 oil. But we remain caught up in a collective sense - a delusion - that everything is just going to carry on humming. Normal is gone.

I don't know about you, but I think there has been a gut feel - among many ordinary people - that we have been heading for trouble for some time. That we just couldn't continue carrying on the way we have been. Reality may take a while still to dawn, and unfortunately when it does, people will have nervous breakdowns, systems will also break down - because even the real world can't stand too much reality. Our world has picked up a terminal disease, and has started dying.

Why is there Xenophobia in South Africa? Why now? Who is behind it? Here's a clue

When you Google Xenophobia or Johannesburg Violence you come across plenty of assessments for why this is happening. 9/10 miss the point. The clue behind this mob behaviour is that in every instance it is associated with looting, with ordinary people running around with someone elses stuff. That speaks volumes. It's a zero sum game mentality - us or you, you go (or die) and we get what you leave behind.

This is difficult for people to understand who have cars and televisions. When you see people squabbling over a stolen bag of flour, messing the snowy powder over themselves in the tug of war, it begins more obvious just how desperate the poverty must be in some of these areas. And many of the poor are suffering the highest levels of AIDS attrition. Commonly, AIDS lays waste to those old enough to work - parents. And there have been alarming reports of large numbers of youths making up these mobs.

So there you have it: poverty - which induces resentment - Aids - which induces desperation - an influx of foreigners - which provides a convenient target (for now) - ongoing price increases and Zimbabwe's continuous decline - providing a combined sense of hopelessness and fear.

My concern is that as inflationary pressures increase, this mob violence will spill over into ordinary suburbia. Its the have nots (and there are millions) against the haves.

Scary Quote of the Day

Every one-cent increase in gasoline prices means Americans pay $1.42 billion more a year for gas, according to Stephen P. Brown, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Nearly two-thirds of that goes to foreign producers. - JAD MOUAWAD and MIREYA NAVARRO

From New York Times.

Chaos (ART/IMAGES)

China Earthquake survivor. The rescue efforts in China, they say, are having an impact on overall demand. A Cyclone in Mynmar has crippled their ability to supply rice to neighboring countries, making their food dependent overnight.

Johannesburg mobs raid, murder, burn and steal.

US subprime crisis tanks their economy.

As the earthquakes happen, frogs erupt in migrations in China; rivers starved of oxygen.

This is the chilling precedent when the impoverished strike out in desperation and anger. Governments will try to crush the uprisings of their own citizens with extreme force and later, extreme prejudice.

Food at a conventional streetside stall in China. We've become the locusts of this planet, except we devour everything, even emptying out the bowels of the Earth. All of the above images are from the last 4 weeks.

USA Starts War On OPEC

House passes bill to sue OPEC over oil prices

The lawmaker said Americans "are at the mercy" of OPEC for how much they pay for gasoline, which this week hit a record average of $3.79 a gallon.

The White House opposes the bill, saying that targeting OPEC investment in the United States as a source for damage awards "would likely spur retaliatory action against American interests in those countries and lead to a reduction in oil available to U.S. refiners."

The administration said less oil going to refineries would limit available gasoline supplies and raise fuel prices.

NVDL: This is laughable, and desperate, yet we can expect it to become more serious and more desperate. America really is becoming strangled and facing death throes and so they are reaching for straws to keep the juggernaut operating. Question: isn't technology supposed to save us? Where's that technology now? Where are those intelligent people who were going to sort this out for us while we continued to consumed and demand? The answer is, the people who were supposed to think about the problem and deal with and find a solution was always, you guessed it, ordinary people like you and me. We knew we had to change, we were just too damn lazy. And now that change is upon us, we want to sue the bastards, fight someone, blame someone. Uh uh. There's no solution except to change our habits, scale down, live more modestly.