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- Friday Outlook: Commodities, Emerging Markets [view article]
- Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
- Bespoke's Commodity Snapshot (7/23/08) [view article]
- Is Natural Gas Down for the Count? [view article]
- Natural Gas Volatility Spiking [view article]
- Thursday Outlook: Commodities, Emerging Markets [view article]
- Best and Worst Performing ETFs This Week [view article]
- Implementing Pickens' Plan for Public Energy Policy [view article]
- Managing Duration for Commodity Funds: Which Strategy Is Best? [view article]
- The 'Peak Oil' Myth: New Oil Is Plentiful [view article]
- The Realities of Natural Gas [view article]
- The Death of Natural Gas [view article]
loading ...Recent UNG Articles
- Friday Outlook: Commodities, Emerging Markets
- Bespoke's Commodity Snapshot (7/23/08)
- Thursday Outlook: Commodities, Emerging Markets
- Natural Gas Volatility Spiking
- Is Natural Gas Down for the Count?
- Does Al Gore Finally Get It?
- Managing Duration for Commodity Funds: Which Strategy Is Best?
- Best and Worst Performing ETFs This Week
- For ETFs, First Half of 2008 Was All About Commodities
- The Death of Natural Gas
- Full List of Articles »
Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
Igorisky: not sure where you got the 10x number on CO2 absorbtion, but i pretty much concur with all of your observations and prognostications. as you said, we are seeing more and more evidence every week, month, and year that goes by and the climate swings are more drastic and happening ever faster. that is one reason i recently added the blurb about population control in my energy policy:thefitzman.blogspot.co...
however, from a humane perspective, i am against enforcing a population control policy. at the same time, i am a big fan of education...and if we only had world leaders that would discuss the energy, pollution, and natural resource strain of population growth, perhaps it would help. Reply
Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
FITZMAN you are welcome. hey i am no super brain like my brother but i am always ready to listen and learn and at least consider what the other guy says. as i told a man who was abusing his wife that was my friend. you will find me rougher to deal with than a 95lb woman. some of us older guys might be a little hard to kick to the curb. ReplyDoes Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
Fitzman. The equivalent energy we use daily of all oil, gas and coal is 200 million bbl of oil. For non-global warming believers and the scientifically challenged, here are are some Q & A to ponder. This equivalent 200mm barrels daily, when combusted creates 10 times plus amount of CO2 that plants and trees can photosynthesize daily. The unused amount accumulates in our atmosphere daily. I takes years to feel the effect but it is there creeping up at all of us slowly.To put it in undestandable terms. When you run your car inside a closed garage, CO will accumulate and in about 20 to 30 minutes you will die from carbon monoxide poisoning.
The earth is like a big super duper enclosed garage enclosed by the forces of gravity. At the rate we are burning fossil fuels, it will be about 80 to 100 years before most animals (includes humans) on earth will choke and die. However, this will never happen. why? Because in a few years time, within the next 10-20 years, the climate pattern on earth would have changed so much that our ciites will experience more and more extreme weather like more powerful typhoons, tornadoes and hurricanes, more dry weather in formerly moderate areas and more extremely wet in other areas causing flooding and drought where there it has not happened before. There will be extreme snow fall but for short periods in some areas. Weather patterns will change at a rate much faster than people can adjust. The result - less harvests in farm lands, flooded cities, destroyed man made structures everywhere. This has been happening for a number of years now. An example of this is the Mississippi which is flooding again only 13 years after the last one. The cycle is getting shorter all the time as we continue to burn hydrocarbon.
With all these changes comes changes in insects and diseases. More of them are moving north as the weather pattern shifts. Diseases will cause more people to get sick and/or die.
I other words, the people population on earth (the root cause of climate change) will start to decline and the CO2 generation will decline with it. The earth will self correct our man generated excesses.
How do we prolong the good living on earth as we know it today and pass it on to our next generation? Start reducing our consumption of hdrocarbons fast and bring down the population growth to a more sustainable level. Who decides where the sustainable level is? Mother nature will determine that of course!
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Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
freefall: i mention GW bush because so many people take what he says to be "gospel". they believed him when he was against global warming. after going to international conference after international conference and being the only one against the global warming theory (well, his buddy the PM of australia was too....but not the newly elected PM) and being embarassed by the science presented to him...bush finally came around and acknowledged it. however, i supposed until rush L. endorses it, there are many bush fans and radio listeners who are going to pooh-pooh science until the earth gets so hot their brains melt. i remember when the US used to be a country of science and scientists...now we are into "reality" TV and and rush L. - what a joke and symtomatic of our fall from world leadership. meanwhile, cheney forces the EPA to cut the requirements on coal emmissions, which is the biggest step backwards since one of the few positives from the Nixon administration (founding the EPA).fireball: thanks for the kind words and the comments. wrt carbon dating of the ice-core samples, a few things are very interesting to me:
1) carbon dating has been an accepted scientific method for quite some time. it's been used in many varied geological and archaelogical situations without being questioned.
2) the carbon dating data of the ice-core samples prove and match the cyclicality of the Earth's climate history which so many people point to as saying "it's all just cyclical". yet, when this same technique also shows CO2 levels rising exponentially in the last 100 years, all of a sudden there are many theories as to why that data is "flawed"
3) the ice-core samples have now been tested by multiple independent international scientific groups, and they are all in agreement (99% anyhow). the only groups or scientist that i know of are the ones like the MIT guy who has been accepting money from XOM for years. he is pretty much marginalized by all credible groups, including the US governments own scientists, whose reports on global warming are very conclusive (at least before cheney altered them). Reply
Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
FITZMAN i kept thinking you deserve an answer better than i can give on the ice core samples. my brother has a degree in chemical engineering. he worked for about 12 years and got bored with it. he returned to school and is now a dentist. i did not tell him why i was asking. i did not want to skew his answer. he said to look at it as a reverse of refining gold. at certain temperatures some of the materials melt and run off. eventually you hit golds melting point and it runs off reasonably purified. then he used the example of dry ice and how much colder it is than water ice. he said to capture the co2 you would need to flash freeze at a cold enough temperature to freeze everything solid at once. so i guess whoever brought up the beer? soda? or carbonated water was on track after all. so anyway i still say thank you fitzman. i have to call him back and tell him why i asked such an out of the blue question. ReplyDoes Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
FITZMAN i agree with freefall in saying thanks. it was fun. i know we agree that the energy crises must be addressed. i just see that the easiest way to get change is financial incentive. we seem to have agreement about cycles. if you look at crop growth (weather records are probably much less accurate because of technology) back a couple of thousand years the implications point at another warming period. i too am very conservative at least physcally. i really do not care about private behaviour as long as it does not affect me. promiscuos sex, have fun, but if you catch something or produce a child take care of it yourself. as i understand it plants breathe in reverse of us. i do not know about the beer in the freezer experiment proving or disproving the co2 in ice statistics. it does make it flat. i am to conservative to be a republican. it is not conservative anymore. i guess i am a constitutionalist or libertarian or independent i know i want americans to regain that work hard mind your own business attitude that is dying out. i liked post missle crises jfk and pre assassination attempt reagan. the rest except for a handful of representatives and senators i have nothing but contempt for. what i like about seeking alpha is the open forum. i do like for americans to talk to each other especially about politics and important issues. my hardworking farmer neighbor farmer said it best. the last thing washington wants is for regular amercans to discuss those subjects. deforestation is hard to grab unless we want to become even more imperial. the u.s. once again is doing better than most within our borders. your answers to thinkbig and maximo tell me that we see the core problem in almost the same way. your answer to lonie confirms that. polite debate is becoming lost as morgan demonstrates in his first paragraph. insult is not the way to get people to listen. i am just glad to see a little passion from americans. it is o.k. morgan at least you care. i blame the government schools for any lack in the young people when it comes to education. my father used to say children insult, call names and fight, intelligent adults talk and reason and even if they do not agree at the least they understand why they do not agree. i learned a lot from your article and from the posts and from your responses . thank you fitzman. one other piece of advice from my father which has served me very well. do not borrow money. if you need to then you cannot afford the purchase. interest makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. ReplyDoes Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
Fitz,I give you credit that you blog something that gets that many controversial comments and that you then even feel compelled to comment on them. That is fun.
That said, the fact that you have to cite the judgement of GW Bush to make your case for global warming is actually a case against it. Reply
Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
wow - alot of comments. thanks all. here some quick responses...i feel i am a bit of a bore because i continue to repeat the same old themes...but, what the heck. i keep hoping somebody can convince me that oil and global warming aren't real problems...hasn't happened yet. here goes:spike: the reason i mentioned the californians was that, i just recently saw a poll where for the first time since the santa barbara beach spill, a majority of those in california were favoring off-shore drilling. personally, i don't think we have a choice. we can either get serious about energy, or, watch our economy, currency, and way of life dissapear. it is that critical IMHO. time will tell...
fireball: welp, like i said, i've made up my mind on global warming and the scenario 1,2,3 in my earlier comment has yet to be addressed by anyone on here. the amount of CO2 released by man's burning of fossil fuels, combined with the planet's continuing deforestation, mesh with the ice-core data samples. couple all that with the common sense observations any aware human can easily see about what is going on currently with our planet is enough to convince me of the problem. that said, REGARDLESS of the global warming debate, the point of the article was we kill two birds with one stone (although some say only one bird...) by addressing the oil supply/demand problem, which is the most imminent threat to the US.
lentz: i think the debate is comical as well. you tell me where all the additional CO2 from burning 85 million barrels of oil and millions of tons of coal a day are going? at least we agree on transitioning away from oil as most of your points are in my energy policy as well.
jackooo - they should have raised gasoline taxes in the 1990's when oil was cheaper. they should still raise taxes on gasoline...over time..gradually..with plenty of warning...to provide the kick in the ass Americans need to face reality.
maximo: *think* - that is good advice. nobody's thinking these days...everybody just has their agenda. i mean people still think george bush is a "conservative&quo... republican. but he's not. he's grown the US government the biggest its ever been, taking away our liberties and privacy, grown the biggest fiscal deficit in history which has caused the US dollar to drop like a rock, opened our borders to illegals while proclaiming to be the leader of the war on terror, and cratered 50 years of American foreign policy. there is nothing conservative about bush - he's the most radical president we have ever had. yet, people still "think", he's a "conservative&quo... republican. he isn't. i am.
mcgregor: "man wasnt the cause of previous cycles, so what was"? well, as many have said, the Earth's climate is cyclical and there are many reasons for previous changes (volcanoes, meteor strikes, etc. etc). that said, these changes happened at specific times due to specific stimuli or, over hundreds of thousands of years. what we are seeing now is, over just the past 100 years, is an exponential growth of CO2 in the atmosphere which is NOT the result of a meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes going off. what we are seeing now is the effect of burning 85 million barrels of oil a DAY and burning millions of tons of coal a DAY while at the same time the Earth's forests are being cut down to grow crops or harvest wood. the ice-core samples very clearly point out the exponential growth in CO2 in just the past 100 years so, compare that to the data from the last hundred thousands years and you will begin to comprehend.
thinkbig: if you were thinking big, you would see that george bush has done more to make us the socialistic utopia that you mention. we have the US dollar down 50%, we have the gov. taking over publicly traded firms on wall street and bernanke and paulsen wanting the gov to take over even more control of the financial system, and you have the gov now able to tap your phone conversations and basically do anything that want with what should be private data. so, think about all that. bottom line is this: under bush, the middle class has been gutted bigtime while the ultra rich are harvesting the country's wealth (i am not talking about people with a million or two dollars (they aren't rich, they just think they are), i am talking about the people with hundreds of millions and billions of dollars). that leads to a stratified social system where control is easiest to implement (especially via energy and food prices and availability - which is the next phase of their grand plan). thus why it is so important to get an energy policy in place, and thus, why those in charge are dragging their feet on it. their policy is to let the disaster unfold so they can "govern" by catastrophe. read the "shock doctrine" by naomi klein.
maximo: your last comment was dead on and better said than my article which was my attempt to make the same point.
fireball: the poles ARE melting and there will soon be only 1 or 2 more glaciers in "glacier national park". these are facts, not opinions...
freefall51: i, and the nobel prize committee, disagree with you. even bush has finally admitted global warming (or as he says, climate change) is a real phenomenon. i thought the leader of the "republicans"... finally conceeding would bring along his troops just like rush limbaugh does, but, reading these comments, apparently that's not enough. maybe a few more years of evidence will bring those slow to embrace science around to reality.
calvin: unfortunately, wrt to a real energy policy, i would agree with you and it's gonna get ugly over the next decade.
mcgregor: tell the folks down in south florida and southern california that are fighting erosion of their seaside property that ocean levels are not rising and storms are not more destructive than in years past.
longoil: banging al gore on the money question is similar to banging t. boone pickens on his energy opinions because he can make money on the conversion to wind energy. as pickens said the other day on CNBC: "money?? i HAVE plenty of money! i am doing this because i am an AMERICAN and i care about the country my children and grandchildren will inherit". what about people who just plain give a damn? there are some you know.
optionsgirl: i'm glad that you like reading me. we are far apart on economics? so, you like big fiscal deficits, a weak currency, and tax breaks for billionaires? if you like bush's economics...they've been just great for the S&P500 huh? ok...sorry..i'll behave ;) you ask: at what point will it be unonomical to develop canadian tar sands? won't happen. they are in for the long haul and the oil majors all know it which is why they are investing there. COP is even going to work on a pipeline all the way to the gulf to refine the sludge. i think canroys are a good play for US investors because the canadian loonie will continue to show strength against the weak US currency, which in my opinion can only weaken further due to the policies of the administration. just put it in your IRA so you can get the favorable tax treatment. on specifics, i still can't detail it out cause i've been on an extended vacation and haven't had time to research them. but, i will soon.
kebu: all for electrified transportation...actua... any kind other than gasoline fired. it's in my policy.
morgan: i can't believe we are either! :)
lonie: well, i disagree. just because oil supply won't keep up with oil demand doesn't mean the world still wont burn millions of barrels a day for decades to come. and coal will continue to be relied on since we are sooo slow to deal with the energy problem in a realistic fashion and because of china. so, there are definitely enough fosil fuels to roast the planet. that said, i believe the economic and social turmoil due to the oil "problem" will happen first.
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Natural Gas Volatility Spiking [view article]
Nice article Bill. Thanks. ReplyDoes Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
Is this Thorium proposal to partially replace U-308 as nuclear fuel legitimate ?I think we will run out of hydrocarbons before there is a real threat of world endangerment . The real problem is running out. Reply
Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
anbody care about canroys? Anyone have an opinion of AAV--had a hard fall? ReplyDoes Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
I can't believe that this is actually a debate about whether or not global warming exists. Please tell me that you are all above 40 so I know that there is hope for the rest of the population once you're kicked to the curb and retired?Open your eyes, look past political issues, and read about climate change until you can article your point past the one point that really doesn't mean much "the climates always changing". Sure its always changing but we're headed towards- unseen since Dinosaur Times Earth and it's changing faster than ever.
Ignorance won't isolate you from the problems. Reply
Is Natural Gas Down for the Count? [view article]
2008traveler- To me, it doesn't seem that far out that we would move towards using natgas in the next few years.Interesting piece on the OIL VIX vs. nat gas today. Very timely piece if you get a chance to read it
www.greenfaucet.com/en... Reply
Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
Two comments - -1. I don't think Al Gore gets Peak Oil - - or at least he's not willing to come out and say the words. Read his proposal; there's not a hint of the idea of the finality of a production peak anywhere.
2. Fitz-man, your energy plan has one short paragraph on electrified railroads. Alan Drake has set out a comprehensive proposal on Electrified Railroads at www.theoildrum.com/nod... that you could borrow from to expand your plan. He makes the case that, even using coal-fired power plants, CO2 pollution from electric rail transport is substantially reduced from that emitted by any fossil-fueled truck transport. The potential energy savings from expanding electric rail are massive. Reply
Does Al Gore Finally Get It? [view article]
Hey Fitzman. I love reading your articles because we are soo far apart politically and from an economics and scientific standpoint, light years apart, and yet have arrived at the same kinds of investment strategies. Well, I have a question for you. Now that oil is falling ( short term only, I agree) can you tell me at what point it would be uneconomical to continue to develop the Canada Oil Sands? Now, here is why I am asking. The Canadian Royalty Trusts have been paying very well ( some above 10% dividends--and they pay monthly) but I have been stopped out (with profits) because of oil's dramatic fall from $147.00+. Gotta love a protective stop loss.So, my question is, ( because I like investments better than politics) long term, and tax issues aside, are the CanRoys still a good investment? Any ideas? Reply