Ippoippo

There was a report in the FT today, with more ‘bad news’ being slowly leaked out by the IEA.

“Structural demand growth in developing countries and ongoing supply constraints continue to paint a tight market picture over the medium-term,” the IEA said in its Medium-Term Oil Market Report, released on Tuesday in Madrid.

“Poor supply-side performance since 2004, in the face of strong demand pressures from developing countries, has forced oil prices up sharply to curb demand,” the watchdog added.

Crude oil prices surged on Wednesday more than $2.50 to $142.73 a barrel, but still below Monday’s record high of $143.67 a barrel. The report also said that current oil prices were “justified by fundamentals.”

You can also read what The Energy Bulletin say about that report in the FT.

Japan is a market pioneer again: the first industrialised nation with no butter

Is this the first signs of Market failure?
As the article sub heading states…

An explosion in grain prices and a slide away from self-sufficiency is causing global crisis. And wealth is no guarantee of insulation

Another story, which also mentioned in passing

Yesterday, Japan was forced to secure emergency butter shipments as the rocketing price of feed and resulting drop in milk production has left the country’s supermarkets with sudden shortages of a basic foodstuff.

There has been a fair bit of coverage in the British press recently by the increases in stabbings and knife crime in London.

However, on Sunday, Tokyo was hit my a mass stabbing. The BBC coverage is here, MDN Coverage (in English) here, and there is some blog coverage here. (Warning, the blog report has slightly more graphic pictures).

It’s all pretty horrific, and seems a lot worse in way because this kind of crime is relatively rare in Japan.

Meanwhile, there is a 2-ch (Ni-Channel, a large Japanese chat forum) backlash now, because of the somewhat idiotic actions of bystanders in the background of live TV reports who were mucking around.
Whilst those people being somewhat insensitive is pretty depressing, the 2-ch mob reaction is pretty unpleasant too.

Other Japan links

Talking of mob reactions, the Times newspaper reported on mob behaviour by parents of Japanese school kids.

The stage was set, the lights went down and in a suburban Japanese primary school everyone prepared to enjoy a performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The only snag was that the entire cast was playing the part of Snow White.

An alternative approach to spreading Peak Oil theory to the masses???

Here and here.

Ahh, the sex sells approach ehhh?

‘Oily Cassandra’ (the second link above), has done some other videos, and she really is quite the ‘doomer’ (she’s done other videos.)

Last week, there was a fair bit of reporting about Sharon Stone when she said…

I thought, is that karma – when you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?

… referencing the earthquake in China being about karma in retribution for Chinese actions in Tibet.
Whilst, to me anyway, being a bit of a “mehh, not really that interested”, I did catch some comments on the BBC’s Have Your Say comments on their News website.

I particulary liked this one on the matter…

People are always entitled to their opinion, but opinions, particularly religious ones that have no evidence to back them up, are often dangerous or offensive to people. It’s no more provable than if I claimed it rained yesterday because the Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster was angry with me because I didn’t finish all of my pasta-based dinner.
Ryan Hawthorne, Brighton

A response to Gordon’s views

This is what David Strahan (author of ‘The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man’) had to say about Gordon Browns announcements about the oil price.

Even by the low standards of his Government, Gordon Brown’s recent pronouncements on oil have been surprising. Writing in a national newspaper on Wednesday, he argued that the price of a barrel had soared to $135 because of barriers to production that are “technical, financial and political”.
There are problems here, sure enough, but the word he left out was “geological”, and the omission is crucial. It means he really doesn’t understand the profundity of the current crisis, and explains why panicky initiatives are bound to fail.

F@*%ing idiot economists

There were two stories reported here and here.

Something caught my attention in the second one…

Others assume the reverse: that the price is bound to keep rising indefinitely, since supplies of oil are running short. The majority of the world’s crude, according to believers in “peak oil”, has been discovered and is already being exploited. At any rate, the size of new fields is diminishing. So production will soon reach a pinnacle, if it has not done so already, and then quickly decline, no matter what governments do.

As different as these theories are, they share a conviction that something has gone badly wrong with the market for oil. High prices are seen as proof of some sort of breakdown. Yet the evidence suggests that, to the contrary, the rising price is beginning to curb demand and increase supply, just as the textbooks say it should.

Woooaaaa, what happened to basic common sense in a closed system and a finite resource.
How can decreased demand result in more of a finite source becoming magically available??