Strikes Strikes Strikes

Today they are striking in London.

LONDON (AP) -- Oil giant BP PLC on Sunday was closing a pipeline system responsible for delivering almost a third of Britain's North Sea oil production.

Also "in a row over pensions" which is not explained in the AP/Times article, the article by AFP (Agency France Press) or in the article in the Wall Street Journal.


AFP

The closing is expected to cost the company about $100 million a day -- and rationing has begun.

Where's Thomas freedman when you need him? Though I bet his new book will cover some of this territory... One problem with the set up of news in this country is that it is really bad at piecing together stories -- giving some sort of overall information, except in circumstances where one reporter rises to the position of leader. Anyway, Friedman, if you are listening, maybe not the best time for a sabbatical!

It would be nice to have some analysis...
I imagine the rise in oil prices is putting pressure on everything -- oil companies are making more money now -- while people are paying more and beginning to feel the crunch.

Ben Stein said the big oil companies are us -- but I'm not sure how many people would really feel that way.

Interesting note -- when you search Google by oil and strike, the majority of the hits are American military strikes in Iraq.

Verbs

Slides Tops Sends Slides Falls Shoots Push Drops Fall Soar Raises Climbs Climbs Soars Surges Surges Surmounts Falls Dips Slips Tops

Far Above The Ceiling

The following are all from headlines in the New York Times. Except for the last semi-heroic couplet, they are in descending order from today to 2004.

Oil Slides Below $110 as Dollar Gains on G7 Talk
Crude Oil Tops $112 a Barrel
Tight Inventories Send Oil Prices Higher
Oil Slides to $105 as Iraq Tensions Calm
In Reversal, Oil and Gold Fall Sharply
Oil Shoots Higher
Supply Fears Push Oil to Triple Digits
Oil Price Drops Sharply
Oil Prices Fall From Triple-Digit Highs
Gas Prices Soar
Record Price Of Oil Raises New Worries
Crude Oil Price Climbs to Another Record
Oil Climbs, And Stocks Do Likewise
As Oil Soars, Natural Gas Is a Bargain
Oil at Another Record, Surging Above $93
Oil Surges $3.36, Closing Above $90
Can a Plucky U.S. Economy Surmount $80 Oil?
At OPEC, Some Worry As Oil Prices Start Falling
Oil Contract Dips Briefly Below $60 a Barrel
Oil Prices Slip As Speculators Start to Retreat
Just Another Day in the Pit as Oil Tops $52
Oil Above $46 and Far Above OPEC's Ceiling



High-Priced Oil Adds Volatility To Global Scramble for Power
2007 May Be Gone, but the Volatility of the Markets Carries On

My Follow Through

Last night a friend asked if how I choose the stories I write about -- if I really look for them in the morning. I do -- I'm fascinated by the subconscious and the sleepy and the unfolding of my own interest. Some mornings it's really hard though --
I've been looking for an hour again.

On the good news front, the Federal Government has stepped in on the Greka situation I talked about a few days ago. They will clean up then sue the company for reimbursement. The spill is horrible, and the concern is that the spill is on its way to federal waters.

A few weeks ago Andrew Revkin wrote a fascinating blog on DOT Earth (NYTimes) about the state of media and the covering of global climate change and politics.

But here's what catches my eye. An article from a small paper in Danbury CT.

The article starts out talking about how people can't pay their heat bills this year. Well, that was to be expected. Some clients are behind thousands of dollars in oil bills, and seniors are adding oil to their list of trade offs as they balance the importance of medication and food...

"On Monday, before appearing at the news conference, Mitchell said a senior citizen stopped by his office and asked to have only 100 gallons of oil delivered to his home.

'If we had filled his tank, that cost would have taken his whole Social Security check,' [said John Mitchell, who started Mitchell Fuel Co. Inc.in South Windsor 50 years ago.]"

Okay -- all of this we knew. What's interesting, though, is what is folded into this article:

"Meehan [ president of the Portland-based home heating oil company] and a group of fuel dealers appeared at the state Capitol on Monday with U.S. Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., to support federal legislation that aims to remove the speculation in the energy futures market. An Energy Department official this month said market speculation on energy prices may have added as much as 10 percent to crude oil costs."

There has been lots of talk that the current increase in oil prices is based largely on speculation -- on fear and guesses that the supply of oil will be tightening soon. And when that happens people buy and trade on the belief that the price of the futures will also go up. I was actually an economic reporter -- and studied this stuff in grad school -- but that was a long time ago, so I'm sorry if I've somehow oversimplified this into nonexistence...

At any rate, the bill proposes that people who buy oil have to take possession of the oil: You can't trade on the price increase -- you have to want the goods.

"[Mitchell] said there have been difficult years, such as the oil shortage during the 1970s.

"But never have I seen conditions that have so flaunted the reality of what is supply and demand and the pricing of this product," he said."

It's an interesting thought. I can't imagine that would ever happen -- what the bill suggests is overturning the American stock market system -- but interesting, none the less.

What is real -- what is physical -- what is tangible. Doesn't it seem like so often our lives revolve around some idea -- some structured system of what we believe the future is going to look like? Don't we so often get caught up in some reality that if we settled down would have little bearing on the physical world we live in?

What if we did that with everything in our lives -- insisted on truth -- on evidence -- on follow through...

An Accident Waiting to Happen

An article ran today in the NYTimes talking, again, about the price of diesel and the effect it's having on the trucking industry. Companies are cutting the fat out -- they are making adjustments and layoffs and hard decisions. But truckers, according to the article, are also forced to decide what money goes :

"Stunned by the high prices, businesses are trying to cut fuel consumption any way they can. Farmers are buying more fuel-efficient equipment. Truckers are putting off maintenance and packing lunches."

Notice the way putting off maintenance is just slipped in there.

When the really tough decisions come down it always comes to safety eventually. People have to choose between heat and food or food and medicine... gas and brakes.

There was an article in the LA Times last month that said if consumers changed the oil in their cars every 7,000 miles instead of every 3,000 miles, we could save 21.6 millions of gallons of oil waste per year. Now, I think that's probably right -- that oil ratings have improved and the dealerships and engine oil makers have resisted -- but last year I almost burned out my engine... I'm still not altogether sure how that happened -- I happen to think there was something wrong with the car, but it could just be denial.

We have a lot of highways with a lot of cars and trucks.
Maintenance is one of those funny things -- exercise, sleep enough, eat right... oil change, new wipers, check the breaks... meditate, call your mom, change the timing belt...

Hypocracy is the Greatest Luxury

My friend from Paris said he thought gas was about $7/gallon there. I thought it would be easy to figure out -- but not. I've been looking for a half an hour and the closest I've gotten is an English blog post from December.


They put the price in December at about $9 per gallon.

Yesterday I went to the ocean.

I got a little lost. I do that sometimes -- it's my brain's way of tuning out. When I was really stressed out in college I would just 'go for a drive.' I drove cross country for 3 months when I was 22. Camped with my German Shepard from North Carolina to Big Sur.

Yesterday, I think I spent about $20 on gas -- just judging vaguely from the gauge. I think it should have cost me about $10. Though doing the numbers that estimate seems off. Maybe today I will follow things a little more closely.

I have a big car -- it's a really really safe car -- I got my first one when my daughter was born in 2001, and I've been in several accidents since and think they have saved us quite a bit of injury. I think I get about 20 mpg very roughly on average, driving mostly in the city. It also has a very big tank.

If gas was $9/ gallon it would cost $162 to fill up my tank.
It would cost me $20 to get to the beach and $50 to get lost. I use about a tank a week -- just doing the minimal things that I do -- school work grocery shopping. $162/week is more than I spend on anything else.

I firmly believe we should end subsidies to gas companies in this country. We consume a disproportionate amount of the world's oil and emit a disproportionate amount of the world's pollution.

I am not ready to not be able to afford to go to the ocean on a Sunday afternoon.

Life these days
can be so complex
we don't make the time
to stop and relfect
I know from first hand experience
one can go delerious
seriously it can be like that
But before I put my foot in my mouth
'cause that's what I'm about to start
talkin about
please let me confess before all the rest
that I'm afflicted
by this addicted like most in the US
It's tough to make a living when you're an artist
It's even tougher when you're socially conscious
Careerism, opportunism
can turn the politics into cartoonism
Let's not patronize or criticize
Let's open the door and look inside
Pull the file on the state of denial

Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury
Raise the Double Standard

-- Disposable Heroes of Hiphopcricy

One Love, 2

The Top Headline on the NYT site right now is about inflation in the Middle East. Okay, that's not true. The top headline is about the Oscars. But the NEXT top headline.

"Rising Inflation Creates Unease in the Middle East."

The story is very interesting, and rather unease creating in its own right.

It seems to me there are two issues. Rising inflation. Stop. Middle East. Stop.

If we take a look at the Middle East first --

"In Saudi Arabia, where inflation had been virtually zero for a decade, it recently reached an official level of 6.5 percent, though unofficial estimates put it much higher."

One of the things the article talks about is an issue within the government. The thing about countries with an operational king is that that king is supposed to act paternalistic toward his subjects. Subsidies are a major part of the economic workings of many of these countries -- in fact most countries that are heavily state controlled -- so that things stay fairly constant for the average citizen. But with the price of oil increasing so much, so rapidly it's putting pressure on the whole inner workings -- and the rift between the haves and the have nots are growing exponentially. The societal and governmental structure is feeling enormous pressure, and seems to need to find a new way of dealing with all the new money. A few days ago I mentioned Western Universities making their way into the Middle East -- it seems highly unlikely that this is going to make things less volatile.

On one reposting of the NYT article on a blog this morning, one commenter writes "Boo fucking hoo." I don't want to link here, because I don't want to put those cyber connections in place -- sorry. Someone else said something to the effect of "it must be getting expensive driving suicide bomb trucks." Well, things are tough in the blogosphere. Some of us watched poets unwind before our eyes on the National Poetry Foundation blog this month... but things are tough in America, too -- Boo hoo? I'm sad -- in the article it said that a previously middle class guy used to support his family and his parents who lived in the country. He's now unable to send them any money at all. And he just had to switch his baby to the cheap diapers. Moms know -- that means leaks and diaper rash -- that means a lot more cleaning and crying. That means stress -- climbing and quality of life -- dropping. And what becomes of the parents in the country? (I made up that country part -- they don't say where the parents live...)

I wish I had a friendly neighborhood economist to call -- I do, actually, so maybe you will hear more about this soon. It still doesn't quite compute as to why flooding a nation with money makes poverty stronger -- though maybe it's a little like printing more money -- which is easier to understand as a devaluing issue. Could it be that it really doesn't matter if its real money -- as in actual increased earnings -- or paper money? I find this fascinating.

Anyway -- whatever the cause -- things are not going well for a lot of people in the Middle East.

"Public protests and boycotts have followed, and 19 prominent clerics posted an unusual statement on the Internet in December warning of a crisis that would cause “theft, cheating, armed robbery and resentment between rich and poor.” "

It took me a minute to find this statement -- actually, to find a December London Telegraph article about the statement. That's as close as I got. Maybe it was not in English. Ugh -- I don't even know what language they speak in Saudi Arabia. Thank heavens for global etiquette lessons on the web:

((Arabic is the official language of Saudi Arabia, but English is widely spoken. It is used in business and is a compulsory second language in schools. Among the non-Saudi population, many people speak Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, and other Asian languages such as Farsi and Turkish.))

The Telegraph article says, "Wealth distribution is a problem in Saudi Arabia, where members of the royal family - including King Abdullah - and businessmen have been listed by Forbes magazine as among the richest people in the world, while civil servants earn 1,000 riyals ($266) a month."

The statement from the clerics says, "We direct this message to the rulers and officials: we remind you of Prophet Mohammad's words that you are shepherds who are responsible for your flock," the group of 19 well-known clerics, including Nasser al-Omar, said in a statement.

"The rulers should seek to try to remedy this crisis in a way that would ease people's suffering ..."

It happens sometimes that in the course of writing I lose something I was going to refer to. It's very frustrating -- I often read 7 or so articles before writing, and the deadline of my kids alarm simply forces me to finish at 7. I've just lost an article -- but what it was talking about was the economic situation in the middle east causing unrest -- protests and death.

It's important to remember why suicide bombings happen -- unrest, frustration -- colonization... oil. Our entanglement in the Middle East.

The Center for Middle East Strategy at Harvard talks has been talking about the boundaries in the Middle East -- how they are drawn and how they will be drawn in the future.

This was posted on that site yesterday:

"On Thursday evening, Turkish forces entered northern Iraq to do battle with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari has called the move “a limited military incursion into a remote, isolated and uninhabited region.” According to various sources, there have been clashes in the Qandil mountains along the Iraqi-Iranian border and in the Zap region. Turkish aircraft reportedly also bombed targets around Al-Amadiyah, an Iraqi Kurdish mountain town about 10 kilometers south of the Turkish border."

Boundaries -- again. The Middle East.

Buddha said if one person remains suffering we all do. Same as the Jews in yesterday's post -- and Marley too.

I don't know -- what if that is simply practical advice? Boo Hoo because it's going to come for us too... Middle East strife, uprising. Inflation too...

The following quotes are attributed to Buddha:
.........

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
...........

All I guess I can say is I'm glad I don't have diapers to buy -- or parents to support.