User talk:NJGW/5

Gone Fishing

Oil shale economics

Hi, NJGW. There is an attempt to give a boost to the Oil shale economics article. Considering your expertise in the field of petroleum, you may be interested to participate. The discussion is going on here. Thank you.Beagel (talk) 14:22, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

US oil dependence

Thank you and good work. I will give it a serious thought and try to merge them together. I am a newcomer, as you can see. I would propose to merge them together under a title of "Oil Dependency of North America". Obviously I don't know how to merge articles and I need your help.

Regards, Dreamliner888 (talk) 07:12, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

tortoise

Replied. Thanks for your comment. Tony (talk) 02:20, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Alaskan gas production

Saw your hidden connent in the Peak gas article, wondering if gas production rose in the late 1970s due to Alaskan gas production. Good guess, but off the mark, because there are still (2008) no gas pipelines connecting Alaska to the lower 48. Some gas is produced around the Cook inlet for the Anchorage market, but whatever gas deposits there are on the North Slope remain untapped. More likely explanations for increased US gas are technology and price rises. Regards. Plazak (talk) 14:00, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I cited the great difference between Hubbert's projected figure (from his 1956 figure 22) and actual production to illustrate how far off these sorts of projections can be if based on erroneous inputs, even if based on the best data available from someone as highly regarded as Wallace Pratt. Hubbert made a valid contribution, but neither he nor his theory are God, and the mathematical fatalism implied by his curves is subject to modification by technology and economics. I have not studied Pratt's methodolgy, but I do know that since 1956 there have been great fluctuations in natural gas prices, great advances in seismic exploration technology, great improvements in horizontal drilling and massive hydraulic fracturing (needed for tight sands and shale gas), and the startling realization that some coal beds that had been drilled through thousands of times would produce immense amounts of gas if properly handled. Just in 2008, there is a terrific excitement over what some companies say is a huge new gas field in NW Louisiana's Haynesville shale - a formation that had been drilled though hundreds of times. Undoubtably we will run out of gas someday: Hubbert was certainly right (though not original) on that point. But gas production peaked in 1971, again in 1979, 1997, 2001, and now the 2007 data point to a still higher peak. After each of these "peaks" people said, with some justification, that gas had "peaked" ala Hubbert, and we had nothing but shortages ahead; someday they will be right, but it's difficult to say when. The Wikipedia articles on peak theory are full of statements that "X commodity has peaked" in this or that country, with the implication that there is only one peak. To be accurate, the wiki articles should include the fact that for some commodities and regions there have been multiple peaks (Hubbert himself pointed this out), and a "peak" does not always mean irreversable decline from then on. Sorry for being so long-winded. Plazak (talk) 18:06, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

As Hubbert pointed out, local peaks are global peaks in microcosm. He used observations for individual states to justify his projections for the US as a whole, and data from the US to to forecast the world as a whole; if his theory succeeds or fails in individual regions, that has serious implications for the accuracy of the theory in global projections. Also, US consumers depend largely on US-produced gas, so peak US gas would have an important effect on the US economy. If it is valid (as I certainly believe that it is) to point out how accurate Hubbert was in his US oil projection, why would it not be equally valid to point out how inaccurate he was in his US gas projection? It would be extreme POV to emphasize the hits and gloss over the misses. As for his using "outdated" gas reserve figures, believe me, all reserve figures are subject to becoming outdated the day after they are calculated. Now matter how modern the statistical methods used, the best present-day reserve calculations are still subject to the same problems faced by Pratt: it is almost impossible to forecast technology or economics. Also, the earth is full of surprises, both good and bad. Plazak (talk) 19:06, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid that I have to eat my words (see above) on Alaskan gas production. Looking closer at the USEIA data, it turns out that a great amount of gas is being co-produced with the oil on the North Slope, and being reported in the Gross Production totals, even though the gas is being reinjected to maintain reservoir pressure. Plazak (talk) 23:54, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

• "He used observations for individual states to justify his projections for the US as a whole" I was under the impression that he used past discoveries to justify his predictions.

see pages 11-13 of his 1956 paper. He used the examples of Ohio and Illinois to justify the shape of his curve.

• "if his theory succeeds or fails in individual regions, that has serious implications for the accuracy of the theory in global projections" I'd have to see a source which a) says the theory itself has failed anywhere (barring changes in the data) and b) that this has serious implications for the global application.

The utility of any such equation is to make predictions about the future. The whole boldness of Hubbert's work is that he dared to make detailed predictions about future. Anyone can jigger a curve to fit past data. If the timing and rate of peak gas is known only in hindsight, it loses its utility. If the EUR is not accurately known, as it turns out it was not in 1956 and 1971, then the Hubbert equation will give erroneous predictions, as it did.

• "why would it not be equally valid to point out how inaccurate he was in his US gas projection?" I don't believe we've seen anything which indicates that he was inaccurate, only that Pratt was inaccurate.

Hubbert adopted Pratt's numbers as the very best available at the time. So even using the best information then available, the Hubbert curve was a poor predictor in this case. Anyway, Hubbert used his own numbers in 1971, and was again wrong. Again, the point is that even the most knowledgeable workers in the field (Hubbert himself) can be wrong if they have to rely on poorly known inputs.

• "It would be extreme POV to emphasize the hits and gloss over the misses." Again, Pratt's miss, but see the text before you say I've glossed anything over.

Agreed. It is not glossed over as presently written.

• "all reserve figures are subject to becoming outdated the day after they are calculated." Pratts predictions held for 20 years, and given the advances in technology and statistics, I expect today's predictions will last much longer. NJGW (talk) 19:40, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Increased gas was largely due to new technology (unconventional gas and deep water drilling), driven by higher prices. What modern technology and statistics are there that can predict future technological advances? Your faith in today's peak gas predictions is not justified by past experience. Plazak (talk) 00:34, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Sockpuppet

What is your basis for adding this? Bstone (talk) 15:44, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Re: AZ links

Sorry, I got a bit overhasty, when I saw you'd trimmed some useful links (that I probably put there -- I live in the area). Full agreement on the spammy stuff, which is an ongoing problem. Cheers, Pete Tillman (talk) 17:05, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

year links from ancient times

" Has there been any consensus on whether any dates should be linked? "

Sorry for the delay in replying. Single-year links have been on the nose for quite a while, although people are a little more accepting when they're in ancient times. But honestly, I can't see any advantage. Those who write the year articles will complain that they'll eventually be "orphaned"; but my response is "make them a lot lot better and we can find ways of promoting them". Tony (talk) 15:22, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Merger of Renewable Fuels and Renewable Energy

You're right, I was neglectful. I was hurrying down a list (for other purposes) and saw two articles that apparently didn't know the other existed, and threw in Merge notices thinking they were obvious. The two articles really do need to wikilink to each other, and not just through the Sustainable Techniologies category. And the Renewable fuel redirect needs to be fixed or disambig'd. I'm rushed right now, and haven't yet looked to see what to do about the overlapping articles in the Renewable Energy portal. Simesa (talk) 08:49, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Your views on USA engineering 1973 oil shock NJGW?

NJGW, what are your views on below report?

At this point he makes an extraordinary claim: 'I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in in real trouble at that time, they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.'

He says he was convinced of this by the attitude of the Shah of Iran, who in one crucial day in 1974 moved from the Saudi view, that a hike would be dangerous to Opec because it would alienate the US, to advocating higher prices.

'King Faisal sent me to the Shah of Iran, who said: "Why are you against the increase in the price of oil? That is what they want? Ask Henry Kissinger - he is the one who wants a higher price".'

Yamani contends that proof of his long-held belief has recently emerged in the minutes of a secret meeting on a Swedish island, where UK and US officials determined to orchestrate a 400 per cent increase in the oil price.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2001/jan/14/globalrecession.oilandpetrol 218.186.65.79 (talk) 10:00, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

May I interject? The source of this interpretation may be F. William Engdahl[1]:

In May 1973, with the dramatic fall of the dollar still fresh, a group of 84 of the world's top financial and political insiders met at this secluded island resort of the Swedish Wallenberg banking family, at Saltsjoebaden, Sweden. This gathering of Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg Group heard Walter Levy outline a "scenario" for an imminent 400 percent increase in OPEC petroleum revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjoebaden meeting was not to prevent the expected oil price shock, but to plan and manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process US Secretary of State Kissinger later called "recycling the petro-dollar flows."

It is one thing to have the Bilderbergers plan to be the oil sheikhs' bankers, rather than fighting the price rise, but it's quite another to say that the Bilderbergers made it happen, which is a claim you will find on conspiracy sites. The phrase used in the Guardian - 'orchestrate' a price rise - is ambiguous; it could refer to the orchestration of events which you yourself originated, or it could refer to managing the impacts of events initiated by a third party. It is surely obvious that the price rise originated with OPEC - it was a protest against the outcome of the Six Day War! - even if the way that rise was transmitted to western consumers was shaped by western governments and corporations.

You may also find on that page the observation that the gold standard was abandoned just a few years before the 1973 oil shock, a point favored by people who want to think that fiat currency is responsible for rising commodity prices then and now, rather than issues of supply. Engdahl also works this into his conspiracy theory, on the general conspiracist principle that if action A was followed by outcome B, then B must have been the desired consequence of those who took action A - which of course is not true. Mporter (talk) 03:04, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I still haven't read the article yet (it's in an open window on my desktop, waiting for me to have more time), but just glancing at it had reminded me of Engdahl and Lindsey Williams. Williams, besides sounding like a kook for taking over an hour to get to any real point in an hour & 1/4 presentation, has a fundamental flaw in his reasoning (he says the US caters to OPEC because they own so much of our debt, but they own a tiny fraction of what he says they do), and what I've seen from Engdahl never has any sources (just a bunch of conjecture). I might look at the article for fun if I get a chance, unless there's some really compelling reason somebody wants to point out to me. NJGW (talk) 03:40, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Endgahl provides clear quotes from the minutes of a Bilderberger meeting in his book. He gave sources. Bilderberg did not engineer 1973 oil shock. That is distortion of the events. It was the USA that engineered the 1973 oil shock according to some researchers.

USA simply unveiled the plan to Bilderberg members.

Please don't mix serious research with loony conspiracy nonsense.

See also: See V.H.Oppenheim: “Why Oil Prices Go Up? The Past: We Pushed Them”, Foreign Policy,25 Winter 1976-77

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1148022

218.186.67.243 (talk) 11:39, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Economic_crisis_of_2008

I have started a new thread at Talk:Economic_crisis_of_2008#Meltdown_Monday, of which you may be interested. Bearian (talk) 19:59, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Unspecified claim

You have entered an big unspecified claim on the article Drug policy of Sweden. Several sources are official government documents about the present drug policy, the latest is from September 2008, others represent different critical views on the Swedish drug policy. So can you please explain what is unsourced etc in the article.Dala11a (talk) 19:43, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Sure, I'll do that as soon as you show me where I said something was unsourced. The key here is that you are too involved to be able to accurately decide when the tags have been fulfilled. This has been proven by you time after time. NJGW (talk) 19:48, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I am not involved at all i any governmental or anti-drug organization or any pro- or anti-drug organization of any kind. If you don't have any claims on the sources, what is then not in line with Wikipedeia policy in the article?Dala11a (talk) 21:07, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Your actions on this article and others show that you have an emotional involvement with the topic of illegal drugs. Your misconstrual of sources in the past and other issues show that you are not the proper judge for when the tags should be removed. NJGW (talk) 21:39, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

You have still not mentioned one single error in the articleDala11a (talk) 21:44, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

A question for you: Where the tags valid when they were placed? NJGW (talk) 21:52, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I saw in May 2008 (and I have not change my mind) the general tags on top of the article as a misuse of tags. The user who had critical comments should have specified what parts of the article which he considered to be inadequate. I have improved the article since May 2008, but the general view is the same, the Swedish drug policy was well known to me in May from many different sources in Swedish. The latest update is a speech in September 2008 about the Swedish Drug policy, in your recommendation, from the governments official web site, Maria Larssons speech.Dala11a (talk) 23:44, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

If you saw the tags as incorrect to begin with then you obviously are not partial enough to decide when they have been taken care of. The tags were discussed, and a third party was even brought in and agreed that there were issues with the article. The issues stem from your COI. The tags are a signal to some editor with the time to deal with you that they should go through all of your edits and make sure they sources say what you claim them to say... often they don't (and not just on this article). As for the speech, quoting a politician is not a great source as we have seen many politicians say many untrue things in this world... better to use some impartial third party analysis, or at the very least the actual policy in question. I don't remember recomending that you find a speech. NJGW (talk) 02:34, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Speedy declined

Hi NJGW. I just wanted to let you know that I declined your speedy tagging of Catch 22 (band). Since the band has apparently released multiple albums on a notable label, there is a suggestion of notability under the WP:MUSIC criteria, so it does not meet criteria for speedy deletion. If you believe this merits a community discussion, feel free to nominate it as an AfD. Thanks, Paul Erik ^{(talk)(contribs)} 03:58, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Also this Google News search suggests that there are many references out there that could be added to the article. Paul Erik ^{(talk)(contribs)} 04:09, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

No worries, I just came to the article randomly and saw it had only one non RS looking ref, and news.googleing "catch-22 ska" didn't look promising. Looks like they just need to use some of those refs you found though. NJGW (talk) 04:40, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

More on USA's orchestration of 1973 oil shock

More research by Prof. Peter Gowan:

...the Nixon administration decided to try to ensure that international financial relations should be taken out of the control of state Central Banks and should be increasingly centred upon private financial operators. It sought to achieve this goal through exploiting US control over international oil supplies.

It is still widely believed that the sharp and steep increase in oil prices in 1973 was carried out by the Gulf states as part of an anti-Israel and anti-US policy connected to the Yom Kippur war.

Yet as we now know, the oil price rises were the result of US influence on the oil states and they were arranged in part as an exercise in economic statecraft directed against America’s ‘allies’ in Western Europe and Japan. And another dimension of the Nixon administration’s policy on oil price rises was to give a new role, through them, to the US private banks in international financial relations.

The Nixon administration was planning to get OPEC to greatly increase its oil prices a full two years before OPEC did so and as early as 1972 the Nixon administration planned for the US private banks to recycle the petrodollars when OPEC finally did take US advice and jack up oil prices.

The Nixon administration understood the way in which the US state could use expanding private financial markets as a political multiplier of the impact of US Treasury moves with the dollar. But according to the Nixon’s Ambassador in Saudi Arabia at the time, the principal political objective behind Nixon’s drive for the OPEC oil price rise was to deal a crippling blow to the Japanese and European economies, both overwhelmingly dependent on Middle East Oil, rather than to decisively transform international financial affairs.

Nevertheless , Nixon’s officials showed far more strategic insight into the consequences of what they were attempting than most political scientists would credit any government with. Its capacity for deception both over the oil price rise and in the way in which it manipulated discussions with its ‘allies’ in the IMF over so-called ‘international monetary reform’ was brilliant.

The US government realised that the oil price rises would produce an enormous increase in the dollar earnings of oil states that could not absorb such funds into their own productive sectors.

At the same time, the oil price rises would plunge very many states into serious trade deficits as the costs of their oil imports soared. So the so-called petrodollars would have to be recycled from the Gulf through the Western banking systems to non-oil-producing states.

Other governments had wanted the petrodollars to be recycled through the IMF. But the US rejected this, insisting the Atlantic world’s private banks (at that time led by American banks) should be the recycling vehicles. And because the US was politically dominant in the Gulf, it could get its way...

- The Globalization Gamble: The Dollar-Wall Street Regime and its Consequences By Peter Gowan

http://www.iwgvt.org/files/9-gowan.rtf

http://www.marxsite.com/Global%20Gamble2.htm http://www.amazon.com/Global-Gamble-Washingtons-Faustian-Dominance/dp/1859842712 218.186.68.129 (talk) 07:52, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Yasis, do you have any RS sources from contemporary historians? NJGW (talk) 14:51, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Peter Gowan is a reliable contemporary historian. http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/research-units/iset/staff/gowan.cfm

Why did you ask NJGW? 218.186.69.253 (talk) 04:44, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

'I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil.

- Sheikh Yamani, Former Saudi Oil Minister

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2001/jan/14/globalrecession.oilandpetrol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Zaki_Yamani

V.H.Oppenheim: “Why Oil Prices Go Up? The Past: We Pushed Them”, Foreign Policy,25 Winter 1976-77

Since 1971, the United States has encouraged middle east oil-producing states to raise the price of oil and keep it up...

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1148022

20 Years of Censored News: Why Oil Prices go up

While most Americans believe the increase in oil prices was due to the Arab oil embargo started in 1973, few are aware that their elected representatives collaborated with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Persian oil-producing nations to deliberately inflate the price of oil... [2]

Kissinger's Yom Kippur oil shock http://earth.prohosting.com/~jswift/engdahl.html#Kissingers%20Yom%20Kippur

William Engdahl's book "A Century of War" has excerpts of the minutes of a bilderberg meeting in May 1973 where members discussed the coming oil shock.

http://www.amazon.com/Century-War-Anglo-American-Politics-World/dp/074532309X http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/1973_Oil_Shock/1973_oil_shock.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.186.69.253 (talk) 05:43, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Peak gas

I have unhidden the paragraph headings. Also I have added a half of a dozen diagrams and a small amount of supporting text. Could you perhaps give me a hand to fill-in the needed paragraphs in the next few weeks? Konrad Kgrr (talk) 17:37, 19 September 2008 (UTC)