ObamaTravel was mentioned in Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" issue featuring President-Elect Obama. Thanks to Sander for his hard work and to my friend and favorite artist, Daniel Kelly, for helping Sander get to Montana. Nice of Time to post Sander's photo on page 44 in the issue commemmorating the journey of our 44th President (coincidence, you say? I think not!).
Now for the long-awaited 4th part of my ongoing thoughts about oil. If you want to catch-up on the last three, here are parts One, Two and Three.
Despite the recent drop in oil prices due to slackening worldwide demand, the argument that worldwide oil supplies have peaked remains strong. Last night, 60 Minutes did a 24-minute infomercial on Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company. Aramco officials led Leslie Stahl around on a tour of their mind-numbingly advanced facility, but the most salient question was never asked: why do they need all of this? The short answer is that the Age of Cheap Oil is long gone.
Four years ago, Saudi Aramco was injecting a staggering 7 million barrels of sea water per day back into Ghawar, the world's largest oilfield, in order to prop up pressure. Ghawar accounts for 30% of Saudi oil reserves and up to 70% of daily output. All Saudi production comes from very old fields, with no major exploration success since the 1960s, and almost every field has high and rising water cut. (Energy Bulletin)
On 60 Minutes, Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister and de facto head of the OPEC oil cartel stared into the camera and told American audiences that there's plenty of Saudi oil left to keep us fat and happy for another 20-30 years. While that may well be true, how much would oil have to cost consumers for this scenario to be cost-effective and feasible for the Saudis?
Here's why OPEC has been so coy about releasing its proven reserves over the last 25 years and how its reserve levels have magically increased:
In 1985, OPEC countries decided to link their production quotas to their reserves. This, in turn, provoked huge increases in estimated reserves in order to increase their production rights (see charts below). This also allowed OPEC nations to obtain bigger loans at lower interest rates. In a 2006 Bloomberg interview, Dr. Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, a senior oil expert employed by the National Iranian Oil Co., said that OPEC's reserves are grossly overstated, that world oil production is now at its peak and he predicted that it will fall 32% by 2020.
Just take a look at the charts below and consider the rapid decline of the U.S. oil industry in the early 70's. It doesn't take much to conclude that we're being hoodwinked by OPEC. But as long as someone keeps our Hummers humming along, we'd rather just turn a blind eye and moronically chant "Drill, baby, drill!"
If you would like to read a detailed analysis of Saudi oil, I recommend reading Twilight In The Desert by Matthew Simmons.
Declared reserves with suspicious increases (in billion of barrels):
| Declared reserves with suspicious increases (in billion of barrels) Colin Campbell, SunWorld, 80-95 | |||||||
| Year | Abu Dhabi | Dubai | Iran | Iraq | Kuwait | Saudi Arabia | Venezuela |
| 1980 | 28.00 | 1.40 | 58.00 | 31.00 | 65.40 | 163.35 | 17.87 |
| 1981 | 29.00 | 1.40 | 57.50 | 30.00 | 65.90 | 165.00 | 17.95 |
| 1982 | 30.60 | 1.27 | 57.00 | 29.70 | 64.48 | 164.60 | 20.30 |
| 1983 | 30.51 | 1.44 | 55.31 | 41.00 | 64.23 | 162.40 | 21.50 |
| 1984 | 30.40 | 1.44 | 51.00 | 43.00 | 63.90 | 166.00 | 24.85 |
| 1985 | 30.50 | 1.44 | 48.50 | 44.50 | 90.00 | 169.00 | 25.85 |
| 1986 | 31.00 | 1.40 | 47.88 | 44.11 | 89.77 | 168.80 | 25.59 |
| 1987 | 31.00 | 1.35 | 48.80 | 47.10 | 91.92 | 166.57 | 25.00 |
| 1988 | 92.21 | 4.00 | 92.85 | 100.00 | 91.92 | 166.98 | 56.30 |
| 1989 | 92.20 | 4.00 | 92.85 | 100.00 | 91.92 | 169.97 | 58.08 |
| 1990 | 92.20 | 4.00 | 93.00 | 100.00 | 95.00 | 258.00 | 59.00 |
| 1991 | 92.20 | 4.00 | 93.00 | 100.00 | 94.00 | 258.00 | 59.00 |
| 1992 | 92.20 | 4.00 | 93.00 | 100.00 | 94.00 | 258.00 | 62.70 |
| 2004 | 92.20 | 4.00 | 132.00 | 115.00 | 99.00 | 259.00 | 78.00 |
| 2007 | ? | ? | 136.30 | 115.00 | 101.50 | 262.30 | 80.00 |
Two must-read articles on the financial mess we now find ourselves in. One is a pretty quick read, the other is much more in depth:
James Galbraith NYT interview (short)
Niall Ferguson in Vanity Fair (long)
James Galbraith: "And most of them (economists) teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless."
Maybe fundamentally useless on a macro level, but those theoretical frameworks were often designed to game the system and maximize short-term profits.
Here's the money quote from Ferguson's article:
"There was, ... Read Morehowever, another reason why Long-Term failed. The quants’ Value at Risk models had implied that the loss the firm suffered in August 1998 was so unlikely that it ought never to have happened in the entire life of the universe. But that was because the models were working with just five years of data. If they had gone back even 11 years, they would have captured the 1987 stock-market crash. If they had gone back 80 years they would have captured the last great Russian default, after the 1917 revolution... To put it bluntly, the Nobel Prize winners knew plenty of mathematics but not enough history."
I'm still a little speechless after the emotion of last night's landslide victory. All the volunteering, second-guessing and obsessing is finally over. It felt pretty cathartic to delete some of those election-oriented blogs and podcasts that were filling my brain with redundancy. Hopefully, Al Franken's recount will not drag on too long (but will end in a positive result, of course) and Jim Martin will unseat Saxby Chambliss in the GA run-off.
What I'll remember from last night besides Obama's acceptance speech: hugging our neighbors on the street, seeing tears streaming down Jesse Jackson's cheeks and holding my baby a little extra close - assured that the world she'll grow up in now has a better chance to be a better place.
Since the first slave ship arrived on these shores in 1619, think of how many people have doubted that this day could ever come. I like the spirit of this text message that was sent to get out the African American vote: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Barack could run so our children can fly.”
It is about time, though - ain't it?
Check out this multimedia portrayal in the SF Weekly of my voting-in-the-rain experience from Sat. Pretty hilarious (sound required):
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2008/11/voter_suppression_in_san_franc.php
Tomorrow will be the day that so many thought we'd never see.
Tuesday could not come any sooner for me - this is definitely an unfortunate weekend for daylight savings time to roll around! Because I will be sequestered in CREDO Mobile's Election Day bunker from sunup to sundown on Tuesday, I went to SF City Hall to vote early yesterday. Needless to say, the press was all over it!:
Worried your vote won't count? Bring a video camera
Alex Wise -- the San Francisco dude behind the swing state-transport group ObamaTravel -- checked in Saturday to say that folks were waiting 20 minutes in the rain to vote at San Francisco's City Hall when there seemed like there was plenty of room inside. What if people got discouraged and left?
Among those people waiting in the rain to vote: Wise. "And I'm such a shmo, I didn't bring an umbrella."
Worried that there are going to be major problems at the polls on Election Day? Get in line. Literally and figuratively.
There's something you can do other than handrub or wait in the rain: Bring a video camera/phone. See something untoward going down? Fire up your camera. See somebody getting the shaft/runaround when they're trying to check in/cast a ballot? Interview them, then post it to Videothevote.org.
Alex knows about Video the Vote. So why didn't you bring your camera? "I would have," he said. "But I just gave my video camera to my sister who is going to Nevada to Video the Vote." D'oh!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=32222
My apologies to all of my devoted readers for being so slack with the updates the past couple of months. I won't waste your time with excuses of fatherhood and election-oriented activities (I have posted some cute new baby photos!), but, instead will catch-you up on my current projects.
If you haven't checked out ObamaTravel.org, it has been more successful than we could have hoped. There are nearly 250 with profiles on the site and a good chunk of them have received the resources they needed to get to swing states and make a difference for the election. A huge "THANK YOU" to Kevin, Kelly and RIchard who donated their valuable time to help make the site a reality.
I have also been working for CREDO Mobile (part of Working Assets) on two election projects: One, is running CREDO's Election Day immediate response text message network. You can sign up to be on alert to help protect the election here: http://act.credoaction.com/election/
The other project I've been involved with has been creating a mobile version of FiveThirtyEight.com, the polling site founded by Nate Silver. To check out the mobile 538 site, check out: http://credomobile.com/538. And to sign up for daily text alerts about polling data, simply text keyword 538 to shortcode 30644.
I promise to resume writing regularly after the election. In the meantime, let's keep our fingers crossed!
Once again, the presidential race will be determined by the outcome of a few key states (commonly known as swing states or battleground states). I'm pleased to announce the launch of ObamaTravel.org, a swing state project that Moira and I have been working on with three very dedicated web geniuses for the last couple of months.
ObamaTravel.org is a platform that connects volunteers who want to travel to a swing state (like Virginia or Colorado) with financial sponsors and swing state host families. It's sort of a political hybrid of Craig's List, Team-in-Training and Kiva.org - volunteers post profiles and solicit sponsorship from their family and friends. Sponsors can see their donations in action by following the activities of their volunteers.
In order for this project to have a real impact, we need to spread the word as far and wide as we can. So please volunteer or sponsor someone on the site. And forward this post to everyone in your address book who might want to travel to a swing state or who lives in a swing state (actually, just send it to everyone who supports Barack Obama!).
To learn more, please go to: http://www.obamatravel.org
- Palin may be stealing all of the headlines and getting high ratings but this actually helps Obama. As Chuck Todd of MSNBC keeps saying, if this election is a referendum purely about Obama, that helps McCain. Obama had all the press in July and McCain narrowed the gap. Put another way, if voters have to choose between McCain and Obama, Obama has the edge, but if voters have to choose between liking Obama and not liking Obama, it will be a tight race.
- Bush got elected because the GOP had great message discipline in '00 and '04 while the Dems didn't. This year, the reverse has been true: Obama has stuck to his "I'm change, he's more of the same message" through thick and thin. Much like Hillary Clinton's campaign, McCain has thrown the kitchen sink at Obama in terms of messaging. This latest pick of Palin is a concession by the Republicans that the experience card has already been played, so it's tome to ignite the base. Which leads me to my last point:
- While Palin may have ignited her base, she also has lit a spark in the Democratic base which has been pouring money into Obama's coffers this week. The numbers don't add up for the GOP this year if it's Dem base vs. GOP base. So igniting the GOP base would have been fine if she hadn't raised the ire of Obama's base. Beware of the Base!! (Even that drivel-spewing Republican strategist Mike Murphy is with me on this one: I think she’ll ultimately be a polarizer.... In a year where the Democrat generic numbers are 10+ points better than the Republican, I don’t like the math of a strategy that just polarized the election along party base lines.)
My apologies for not doing a better job of live-blogging of the Obama acceptance speech last week but I thought it better to enjoy the event than spend the whole time furiously punching my cellphone keypad. Hopefully, most of you saw the speech on your own and weren't counting on yours truly for any vital insight or analysis. But assuming that most of you didn't know many folks who attended the event, I thought I would jot down a few random thoughts unrelated to the content Obama's speech:
- I realize that this was a made-for-TV event and passing out American flags was a clever marketing idea. But this was a very patriotic event in a way that I hadn't ever experienced first-hand. By patriotic, I don't mean in the way that the G.O.P. has co-opted the words and symbols of our country but in the IDEA of America. It felt cathartic being able to chant "U-S-A!" without an ounce of sarcasm - almost like watching the Olympic men's hockey team upset the Soviets in Lake Placid in 1980 all over again. As you can see, everyone got in on the action:
- I've posted a few more photos (and a very short video) that you can check out here but if you really want to get a feel for the layout, check out this interactive photo from the NY Times.
- As far as the other speakers featured that night, I think Bill Richardson gave the best received speech of the lot. I was quite unimpressed with him during the campaign, as he seemed to go to his resume as a crutch whenever he was asked a tough question, but he was terrific last week. His pointed references to the failures of the current Administration to uphold and protect the Constitution got some of the loudest pre-Barack applause of the night, and rightly so. Just like I found it refreshing when John Edwards called the poor the poor, instead of "hard-working middle class Americans" on the campaign trail earlier this year, I liked how Richardson laid it out plainly:
"It's time we had a president committed to fighting poverty in the Third World and ending the genocide in Darfur; who leads international efforts to stop global warming, strengthens our friendship with Mexico and Latin America, and stands behind Israel with full-time diplomacy to achieve peace in the Middle East; a president who ends the global scourge of AIDS in our time and sets an example of moral leadership by following our Constitution, shutting down Guantanamo and ending torture."
- With the Republican National Convention now blessedly in our rearview mirror as well, it's worth noting the stark contrast of the audience. Not only in terms of demographics, which was fairly obvious to most TV viewers, but also in terms of the general vibe. It was a very positive crowd and even the red meat that they were thrown by some speakers made them rally around their candidate and ideals more than hating their opponents, which seemed to be a constant undercurrent to the recent GOP gathering.
