As long as we are talking about energy issues….

The US plans to hold what State Department officials are calling “exploratory talks” in Riyadh next week to gauge Saudi objectives behind their interest in a civilian nuclear deal. The US also wants to explore whether the Saudi government would accept restrictions to ensure its nuclear fuel is used purely for civilian purposes, according to congressional sources.
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The US has recently concluded civilian nuclear trade deals – or so-called “123” agreements – with India and the United Arab Emirates and is in advanced discussions with countries including Jordan, Vietnam, and South Korea.

Christian Science Monitor

Top exporter Saudi Arabia approved sales of 3 million barrels of extra crude to India for August to make up for a loss of shipments from Iran due to a payment dispute, sources with direct knowledge of the sale said on Tuesday.
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Iran cut sales for August to pressure Indian refiners into settling $5 billion in debts for oil supplied, after New Delhi failed to find a way around US and UN sanctions that make financing deals with Tehran difficult.

TradeArabia

After the talks by Kaplan and Lynch at the sponsors’ breakfast, Francis “Bing” West, who was sitting near me, said he found them wildly over optimistic about the next several decades, which he thinks will be dominated by the proliferation of nuclear weaponry. But let him tell it his own way: “That was insane. The lesson of Libya is, Get a nuclear weapon and tell everyone to go fuck themselves. Qaddafi got rid of his nukes and we said, ‘OK, you’re out of there.'”

Tom Ricks, Best Defense

Pakistan is currently facing a major energy crisis, which some analysts believe may be the worst in its history. It desperately needs Iranian gas and is not shy to say it. “Our dependence on the Iran pipeline is very high. There is no other substitute at present to meet our growing demand for energy” stated Pakistani minister for petroleum, Asim Hussain recently.

the Atlantic

Supposedly, the Bush administration attempted to use Musharraf to convince the Iranians not to go nuclear, which is one of several reasons the administration went so easy on his regime. Yeah, yeah, I know, but someone in the big-time thought it might work. Before you blow a gasket, remember that the world is complicated. There are so many complicated international relationships that Washington has no idea how to handle them in concert. Action A makes issue B better but issue C worse. That’s what happens when you have too many fingers in too many pies.

Why is “drill here, drill now” not a national security imperative?

Interesting Data

I’ve occasionally posted some thoughts on the ways in which people’s political beliefs are influenced by their professions, and we’ve also discussed this topic in Chicago Boyz discussion threads. Here is an interesting analysis of political contributions by various industries and interest groups.

Link via a commenter at this post (7/30, 10:45 am), who somehow derived from this data the conclusion that “Brain industries go with Dems. Muscle industries go with Repubs.”

“The authoritative magazine for VIPs, delegates and diplomats”

Wandering around a soon-to-be-closed Borders bookstore, I run across a glossy magazine dedicated to the G8 summit in Deauville-France (May 2011). The above is a cell phone photo of the cover. I have no idea who publishes the magazine. There are ads inside for airlines, hotels, cars, public policy institutes and various international businesses and governmental agencies. The US Chamber of Commerce and Eurochambers/The Association of European Chambers of Commerce and Industry are two such examples. Turns out that some of the articles are pretty interesting.

The cover makes me laugh, though. It’s an illustration of various national leaders and their relative small size contrasts with the large conference table. Individual nations, suboordinate yourselves to the glory of the international collective of business and governmental interests!

Maybe I’m getting a tiny bit carried away here. I’ve always had an active imagination thanks to the reading of novels and, well, an inherently busy mind. Yoga, music, meditation, book reading: all of it calms me down. Modern urban – or semi-urban – life is filled with irritating sounds and sirens and sitting in traffic and noisy trains with vaguely scary looking passengers….

So I am going to miss browsing Borders, getting a coffee, and shaking my head at the variety of periodicals. A magazine for everyone and everything. A Special Forces magazine sits right up front along with Mother Jones, Foreign Policy and the Hudson Review. Wait a minute, shouldn’t that one be in the back row?

What do you suppose the existence of a G8 magazine says about our society? Nothing remotely reassuring, I imagine. If debt ceiling drama seems incomprehensible, it’s likely because a certain percentage (not all, to be fair) of our politicos spend considerable amounts of time skimming vapid briefs and dopey position papers while flipping through G8 Magazines as they jet between constituent meetings, summits, conferences and hearings. And that’s their body of knowledge on a given subject.

Super.

Our Electricity Future (a bleak version)

A recent Bloomberg / Businessweek article on Pakistan provided a pithy summary of a possible energy future for the US in an article titled “Convoys and Patdowns: A day in the office in Pakistan”.  The article describes the robberies, violence and general chaos that a business manager faces daily in that country.  However, this part might be surprising to readers that would think the Taliban would be a managers’ top concern:

Political violence is not National Foods’ worst problem.  “The biggest problem by far is energy”… Demand for electricity in Pakistan is three times supply.  President Asif Ali Zardari is trying to attract independent power producers to Pakistan and has big plans to build hydroelectric plants.  Companies cannot wait.  “We have created a mix of power we get from the grid, and what we can generate using our gas and diesel generators.”  Many factory floor, office and bathroom lights are kept off to compensate.  Ali often visits the powerhouse, a room at the plant that contains huge German-made diesel generators.  Scarcity of fuel is a frequent worry.  Bigger companies like Lucky Cement don’t rely on the national grid at all.  It started generating its own power in 1996 and can produce 150 megawatts from its plants.

Karachi’s residents have taken to the streets this summer… to protest outages lasting days at a time.  “In the morning I assess my workers”… “If I find someone is stressed out because he hasn’t slept all night without electricity… I have to change his shift and give him easier work”.

Electricity is something that most Americans took for granted as reliable and available for a reasonable price for many years.  After California’s disastrous “de-regulation” experiments in 2000-1 (check wikipedia where they have a pretty good summary under “California Electricity Crisis“), the citizens of that state at least woke up to the fact that the machinery that delivered reliable and reasonably priced electricity was falling to pieces.

The core of the issue is that to meet future DEMAND for electricity, you have to procure appropriate SUPPLY, and then BRING it to the customer.  Given our “NIMBY” culture, and difficult regulatory regime, there has been little incentive to develop new “baseload” generating capacity to procure supplies for the future.  In addition, a lack of investment in new transmission lines, which are needed to bring supply to the customer, limits our ability to tap new sources of electrical generation and there is little financial incentive to devise a solution to this issue.  As a result, we have a long-simmering problem that will come to a head in various guises over the next 20 or so years.

One more subtle issue, that is little discussed, is that electricity started as a public monopoly, meaning that one company provided you generation, transmission and distribution of power and you paid that company a single payment for doing all those services.  While there are many problems with this model (inefficiency and lack of innovation), there were positive elements, mainly that it worked and provided a reliable service to everyone for a reasonable price.

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