Fracking and Carbon Sequestration: Complimentary or Conflicting? (Scientific American)

Climatewire | Energy & Sustainability

Can Fracking and Carbon Sequestration Coexist?

Drilling for natural gas and storing CO2 deep underground may be headed for a collision

By Christa Marshall and ClimateWire  | March 16, 2012

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UNDERGROUND CONFLICT: Fracking for natural gas may require shattering geologic formations that efforts to store CO2 permanently underground require to be impermeable.Image: Wikimedia Commons/Richard Bartz

Natural gas production and carbon sequestration may be headed for an underground collision course.

That is the message from a new studyfinding that many of the same shale rock formations where companies want to extract gas also happen to sit above optimal sites envisioned for storing carbon dioxide underground that is captured from powerplants and industrial facilities.

The problem with this overlap, the researchers found, is that shale-gas extraction involves fracturing rock that could be needed as an impenetrable cover to hold CO2 underground permanently and prevent it from leaking back into the atmosphere.

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Crude Oil Market Manipulations and Speculations | Chris Cook | Naked Capitalism

FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2012

Chris Cook: Spikes and Speculation in the Oil Market – Flash Crash Part Deux?

By Chris Cook, former compliance and market supervision director of the International Petroleum Exchange

Cui Bono from High Prices?

If there is one thing that the history of commodity markets tells us it is that if producers can support and manipulate prices in their favour, then they will.

As those who have read my previous two Naked Capitalism posts (here and here) will know, my analysis of the oil market in recent years is that investment banks have enabled oil producers to create not just one but two bubbles in the oil price. The first – a private sector bubble – was from 2005 to July 2008, and then – after a collapse in price from $147/barrel to $35.00/barrel in November 2008 – a public sector bubble was inflated in the first half of 2009 which remains to this day.

I firstly outlined how passive ‘inflation hedger’ investors in Exchange Traded Funds and Index Funds essentially lent dollars to oil producers, and were able to borrow oil in return. In doing so, they not only perversely caused the very inflation they aim to avoid, but also eroded the foundations of the crude oil derivative markets as a risk management mechanism.

Secondly, I explained how much of this flow of medium and long term risk averse investment which has financialized the oil market has used the very same Prepay technique which Enron used to defraud investors and creditors. By creating what is essentially Paper Oil the investment banks who come between the funds and the producers have been able to inflate and distort the market price of physical oil, and hence the derivative contracts based upon that price.

Note here that my view of the oil market in the long term is that the price of a finite resource can only go up.

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Matt Taibbi on (BAC) Bankers Behaving Badly (Rollisngstone)

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and 

insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why 

does the government keep bailing it out?

Comment102

By MATT TAIBBI

March 14, 2012 10:55 AM ET

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they'll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. They're out of control, yet they'll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

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Yale Environment 360: Pine Beetle Breeding

e360 digest

15 MAR 2012

UNUSUAL PINE BEETLE BREEDING COULD EXPLAIN TREE EPIDEMIC, STUDY SAYS

A new study has found that some populations of mountain pine beetles are producing two generations of tree-killing offspring each year, a phenomenon that may help explain the scale of damage being done to 

What’s Killing the Great
Forests of the American West?

Across western North America, huge tracts of forest are dying off at an extraordinary rate, mostly because of outbreaks of insects, Jim Robbinswrites. Scientists are now seeing such forest die-offs around the world and are linking them to changes in climate.
READ THE e360 REPORT

vast tracts of lodgepole and ponderosa pines across western North America. After observing beetle behavior during the summer months, scientists from the University of Colorado, Boulder, were surprised to see that some beetles that had been hatched just two months earlier were already attacking trees. Typically the mountain pine beetles spend a winter as larvae within the trees before emerging as adults the following summer. According to the researchers, this extra generation could produce 60 times as many beetles devouring trees in a given year. Since the late-1990s, oubreaks of the mountain pine beetles — linked to warmer winters— have devastated more than 70,000 square miles of forest in western Canada and the U.S., the largest known outbreak in history. “This thing is immense,” said Jeffry Mitton, a CU-Boulder professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of the study published in The American Naturalist.


ORIGINAL POST HERE

SPX breaks 1400

Black Swan Capital: Crude Oil - Does It Really Matter?

 

Oil: does the world have enough, or does it even matter? 

To be blunt, I don't think crude oil's fundamentals justify the current range of prices. Geopolitical risk premium, and its consequent price speculation, is mostly to blame.

But I read an article recently that suggests maybe I'm wrong.

Or maybe political posturing wants me to appear wrong.

Currency Currents 15 March 2012

Unintended Consequences: Japan's Trade Surplus wiped out after Tsunami (ForexLive)

At some point, the MOF may give Japan Inc “the wink”

Written by Jamie Coleman
March 15, 2012 at 12:59 GMT 

The steady grind higher in USD/JPY over the last month reflects several major macro shifts. The most important of these is the radical shift in Japanese trade patterns with huge post-tsunami imports of oil wiping out the traditional trade surplus and pushing the country into a deficit. Rising US yields have been a major contributor as well.

A less heralded factor- and one that is difficult to prove- is the likelihood that the Ministry of Finance probably got word to major Japanese exporters and institutional investors to refrain from selling USD/JPY aggressively  for fiscal year-end books squaring. Coupled with perhaps some “stealth” intervention, we’ve rallied a stunning 8 yen. In a month.

It is hard to ignore the calendar, however. The fiscal year closes two weeks from tomorrow. It would not be a surpise to hear louder talk of exporter sales in the next few days. The MOF and the market have delivered a much more favorable exchange rate for Japan Inc to close its books, just as it did last year. (see chart).

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A Mirrored Perspective of Geo-engineering: Bioengineer humans (Guardian.co.uk)

Bioengineer humans to tackle climate change, say philosophers

Authors defend controversial academic paper saying their online critics have misunderstood nature of philosophical inquiry

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Screen grab of a character from the computer game Deus Ex : Human Revolution, which is about bio-modification of humans. Photograph: deusex.com

Earlier this week, The Atlantic ran an eye-catching, disturbing interviewwith a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University called S. Matthew Liao. He was invited to discuss a forthcoming paper he has co-authored which will soon be published in the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.

But within just a few hours of the interview going live a torrent of outrage and abuse was being directed towards him online. As I tweeted at the time, the interview was indeed "unsettling". Liao explained how his paper – entitled, "Human Engineering and Climate Change" – explored the so-far-ignored subject of how "biomedical modifications of humans" could be used to "mitigate and/or adapt to climate change". The modifications discussed included: giving people drugs to make them have an adverse reaction to eating meat; making humans smaller via gene imprinting and "preimplantation genetic diagnosis"; lowering birth-rates through "cognitive enhancement"; genetically engineering eyesight to work better in the dark to help reduce the need for lighting; and the "pharmacological enhancement of altruism and empathy" to engender a better "correlation" with environmental problems.

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Modelling knew the Pine Beetle's devastation was coming (Scientific American)

Climatewire | Energy & Sustainability

How a Computer Modeler Predicted the Mountain Pine Beetle Tree-Killing Rampage

Over the past decade, North American forests have been decimated by outbreaks of mountain pine beetles

By Nathanael Massey and ClimateWire  | March 14, 2012

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Scientists predicted that mountain pine beetles would devastate large swaths of North American forests as the climate warmed.Image: Wikimedia Commons/Bchernicoff

Over the past decade, the forests of North America have been gripped by some of the worst mountain pine beetle epidemics in history. Driven by record-high temperatures and frequent drought, beetle kill has expanded more than twentyfold across the American West.

In central British Columbia, the insects have destroyed more than 14 million hectares of trees -- an area the size of Connecticut -- in the single largest outbreak the world has ever seen.

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