May 8, 2009

For 7 decades I’ve lived with Climate Change.

Tony Vivaldi, the noted Italian climatologist, noticed and highlighted it almost 4 centuries ago. He was the first person to note that Spring was followed by Summer. After that came Fall. Then came Winter. Every year. Climate Change writ large. Cambia di Clima was how he described it.

In the late ‘60s it was called Global Cooling. A world class fraud named Paul Ehrlich, speaking for the consensus of scientists, told us in 1970 that we would either starve to death or freeze to death before the year 2000. Would it be a hate crime for me to point out that the world is 5 months into the year 2009?

All of a sudden the consensus of scientists told us it was Global Warming. I confess to being part of the problem. After showering in the 1970s, and particularly in the glorious reign of Jimmy Carter, I would discharge some Right Guard out my bathroom window. The purpose was to endanger an already beleaguered ozone layer. Mount Pinatubo – remember? - reduced the destruction of said ozone layer and lowered the ambient temperature. Facts have never interfered with any argument put forth by mush brained modern American Liberals. Thus it was easy for another world class fraud, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. AKA as Alpha Gump, AKA “Cementhead” to his Secret Service bodyguards, to speak for the consensus of scientists and warn us of impending doom. The only solution for us and him, particularly him now that his family lost their gravy train when Armand Hammer, bagman for the Kremlin, died was to buy his books and movies. All credit must go to his wife Thumper Gump and all the charming baby Gumpsters because the head Gumpster is dumber than dirt. His shoes have instructions that say “Toes in first”. For his 16th birthday he learned what to do with his thumbs. All of Washington rejoiced. His biggest academic accomplishment was flunking out of two graduates schools in one semester. It was natural for him to succeed as a modern American Liberal politician. He is like a head to toe prurigo that you want to scratch with a flame thrower. When he speaks he makes adults reach for the latest Borgia cocktail.

The intrusion of facts, hard things in the best of times, has caused the always reliable consensus of scientists to drop Global Warming in favor of Climate Change. I have a friend in Minnesota who tells me that Climate Change is a constant but a predictably unpredictable thing. Some people there have learned to profit from it. It’s an American thing to do.

One of the few highlights of the 7 years I spent on trial in United States Tax Court
was when I, as the petitioner, explained the function of price in calculating coal reserves. I told the Court that the number of tons in place was calculable. The variables of price and exiting technology based on that price made the number of recoverable tons a more moveable feast.

I instructed the Court, and I say “instructed” in the belief that “modesty is an overrated virtue”, that “If no profit is possible the risk is obvious” and, further

“If eggs go to $5 a dozen the rooster lays”

It was way of saying that whenever a commodity, any commodity, has an inordinate spike in price two things happen.

#1 - The marginal user stops consuming it.
#2 - New supplies come to the marketplace.

It is a self evident fact that the amount of coal in place hasn’t changed but the last ton, the marginal ton, could now be mined

That argument, a fusion of Logic, experience, and common sense fell on deaf ears.

In a world of supposedly finite resources, in a world that insists on eating its own intellectual seed corn, in a world where the chattering class tells us the solution to the problem of more dogs than bones is to decrease the number of dogs rather than increase the number of bones, in a world that makes despair a blessing, in a world that says the religious, cultural, and political legacy of Western Civilization is to be mocked comes a Page One story in the World Street Journal on April 30, 2009.

Free men, secure in the knowledge that the fruits of their labors will be theirs to dispose of as they see fit, bitch slapped Mother Nature again. Page One stories tell us of big things, good or bad, that will affect us in a profound manner.

The story about the success of the domestic natural gas discoveries uses numbers that are all but impossible to grasp. Two thousand two hundred trillion cubic feet – one hundred years usage at current consumption levels – has but one contemporary counterpart. It is the Federal Budget and the projected Federal Deficit.

[I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that when she was Senator Clinton she would warn us like a shrill Sunday School teacher that the Chinese were buying all our Treasury debt. She knew that those clever Chinamen were up to no good. She was Secretary of State for less than a week when she filled up a plane with Monica Lewinsky wanabees, and other patriots like Barney Frank to go to the Forbidden City to convince the wily Orientals to buy, buy, and buy all of our Treasury debt. But that is a tale for a different day.]

For 12 years I was an unpaid advisor to the Miami Herald on energy matters. My annual offering, always ignored, was the same year after year. #1 – Turn off the A/C at world HQ by Biscayne Bay. #2 – Drill a well 150 yards offshore from where said HQ sits. Good advice then; better advice now.

The Haynesville Shale, the Marcellus Shale, and the Barnett Shale have one thing in common.

Free men using their own money and employing technology that the consensus of scientists scoffed at 20/25 years ago will produce an amount of natural gas for which no adjectives are suitable. Biblical, Homeric, and Brobdanaglian were some of my favorite terms. They no longer apply. They are inadequate. Should Dr. Johnson return to update his dictionary he would need whole pages to describe the size of what they found.

In 1859, a hugely successful New England based cartel decided to raise the price of their scarce commodity from $2 to $6. 5 years later it was out of business. No longer were whales hunted for their oil which was used so Americans could read at night. Even then we were trying to increase our carbon footprint.

Coincidentally, in 1859, a man named Edwin Drake drilled a well in Pennsylvania despite what the consensus of scientists said. His discovery of hydrocarbons waiting there for 1000 millennia gave birth to the modern era of advancing civilization. One hundred and sixty years after his well came in if you think its net impact has been bad turn off you’re A/C this summer as a penance for 16 decades of profligacy.

It cost $10 per half ounce and took 3 weeks to send a letter by horseback not quite halfway across the country. A first class stamp costs 44 cents today. The service has improved marginally but the price surely has come down.

17 years ago, at his father’s funeral, a contract driller told me he was working on a Russian oilfield that was capable of producing 10,000,000 barrels of oil per day. It produces about 1,000,000. The geology hasn’t changed.

“American Exceptionalism” produced the atomic bomb in 43 months. The Russians stole it. The key to 10,000,000 barrels of oil per day is obvious. That’s why the Russians can’t steal it.

Somewhere out there are some mighty worried roosters.