October 2008 Archives

A spat of stories today following the announcement of ExxonMobil record profit unfolds how the free market may be the undoing of oil before the oil runs out.

• The days of $145 a barrel are over, it's now trading at $65.
• Exxon produced 8 percent less oil and gas equivalent last quarter than it did a year earlier even with ample capital to increase production. As oil prices slide, the budgets A 26 percent quarterly jump in Exxon's capital spending, which reflects the difficulty the industry faces in obtaining and exploiting the few new energy reserves it manages to get its drills into.

• Shell said Thursday it will indefinitely shelve a decision on expanding its operations in Canada's oil sands because of increased costs, while Marathon said its 2009 capital budget will be more than 15 percent smaller than this year's allocation.
• "Most of these companies have seen their peak earnings," Gheit said. "I think earnings will come down. The question is not if, but by how much, and who is going to suffer more."

HOUSTON -- ExxonMobil (XOM), the world's largest publicly traded oil company, reported income Thursday that shattered its own record for the biggest profit by a U.S. corporation, earning $14.83 billion in the third quarter. usatoday.com

Can someone explain to me why they need more tax cuts?

Reinvesting to get more oil...they will hold us hostage and charge us more if their profit is cut...we all invest in oil with our pensions and 401-K and it would hurt us...

I need a reason to understand why this policy is a long-term investment in the future of a baby born today.

A few days ago I posted Jimmy Carter's solar panels shine in the movie "W"

The panels, installed on the White House by Carter in 1977 (along with a wood stove below) during that oil crisis, were an example set by leadership illustrating to the populous that they should move away from oil. The panels were removed in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan who was more of a let the free market work as it will guy. The money went with oil.

Solar panels returned to the White House in 2002.

In the 1870s and 80s, many scientists feared exhaustion of coal reserves.

"One must not believe, despite the silence of modern writings, that the idea of using solar heat for mechanical operations is recent. On the contrary, one must recognize that this idea is very ancient and its slow development across the centuries it has given birth to various curious devices." -- Augustine Mouchot, 1878, at the Universal Exposition, Paris, France.

An interesting review of solar history by Radford University, Radford, Va. with many pictures.

• Abel Pifre, Mouchot's assistant, set up a solar engine to print The Solar Journal in 1880.
• John Ericsson , inventor of the ironclad ship USS Monitor during the Civil War, believed solar engines would be needed in the future.
• American engineer Frank Schuman built a practical industrial scale solar plant at Meadi, Egypt in 1910.
• 1982-1988 If someone had said, "Build the world's biggest technological turkey to prove that solar power doesn't really work," the Solar One plant is the one they would have built.

York County's single ballot question for the Nov. 4 election asks voters to approve a $400 million bond for water and sewer infrastructure improvements.

Do you favor the incurring of indebtedness by the Commonwealth of $400,000,000 for grants and loans to municipalities and public utilities for the cost of all labor, materials, necessary operational machinery and equipment, lands, property, rights and easements, plans and specifications, surveys, estimates of costs and revenues, prefeasibility studies, engineering and legal services and all other expenses necessary or incident to the acquisition, construction, improvement, expansion, extension, repair or rehabilitation of all or part of drinking water system, storm water, nonpoint source projects, nutrient credits and wastewater treatment system projects?

Trinity United Methodist in New Freedom, Pa., has exchanged its natural-gas-fired boiler for a geothermal heating system drawing energy from 450 feet underground. The system should reduce the church's energy costs by an estimated 70 percent.

"Why not use what's in God's Earth to heat and cool his house?" said Anne Duff, a Trinity member

And just in time as a 6% rate increase has been approved by Columbia Gas customers has been approved by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission beginning tomorrow.

Typically, it takes four to eight years to recoup the investment, depending on the type of the existing system, according to R.R. Kling & Sons.

A geothermal system works like an air conditioning system. However, instead of transferring energy with the outside air, energy is transferred with the ground.

The ground temperature remains 53 degrees in southcentral Pennsylvania year round. This means that when the temperature is 90 or 20 degrees outside, the geothermal system can transfer heat to and from the ground more efficiently. A standard heat pump that transfers energy to the outside air becomes less efficient as the temperature outside drops.

The earth provides a stable temperature for maximum efficiency.
original story from inyork.com/ydr

Four-year-old Olivia Payton Yoder rides in a float her grandfater spent 1200 hours making, bands, gospel singers and scary costumes all made up the 59th Annual 2008 York Halloween Parade presented by the YWCA of York.

I went to see the movie "W" last night. Whether you love or hate George W. Bush, it's an interesting movie that digs into G.W. as a human being and not our usual view from the press release or a suited podium puppet.

The movie is fresh with a blend of recent history, so news junkies like myself can melt their own experience and research with the depiction of the producer.

I tried to gauge the crowd. They were all older. I tired to gauge the reaction. It was neutral.

I thought I might feel anger, but I only felt pity and a bond in that we are all products of our parents, experiences and people's expectations; objectivity is sometimes the ability to see past these.

During the movie there was a passing mention (jab) at Jimmy Carter's White House solar panels.

During the 1970's, Carter was dealing with the effects of an Arab oil crisis and was seeking ways to wean us from foreign oil. Carter had some success in reducing the U.S. dependency on foreign oil.

Carter lost re-election to Ronald Reagan in 1980. The solar panels eventually came down in 1986 and the solar research program was gutted by the Reagan administration. Those same solar panels were in operation at Unity College in Unity, Maine for 12 more years.

The college drove an old school bus down to drove Franconia, VA, to liberate them from a General Services Administration warehouse.

They placed 16 of them on their cafeteria roof in 1992, and used them to provide hot water for 12 years. unity.edu A few were used in experiments by students.

Solar energy returned to the White House in 2002 with a grid of 167 solar panels on the roof of a maintenance shed that has been delivering electricity to the White House grounds. Another solar installation has been helping to provide hot water. Yet another has been heating the water in the presidential pool. nytimes.com

I had never heard that the White House currently had solar power until I did some research here. It appears that it was publicized more by the solar industry than the president.

How cool would it be if the White House was a "shining city upon a hill" to the world. A visible symbol of independent energy.

John Winthrop, a pilgrim who arrived in a rickety wooden boat, coined the phrase when he described the America he imagined (reaganlibrary.com); a home that would be free from the restraints of the world he had known.

OPEC is scrambling to tighten up supply as the price crude has dropped 56 percent decline in 16 weeks. Even when they moved to close the flow today, the price continued to fall.

Some effects beyond making U.S. drivers happy and adding a stimulus to the U.S. economy.

• With fewer petrodollars now flowing to the Gulf, Russia and other regions, a major source of global liquidity and investment in places like the United States and Europe is beginning to shrink.
• Iran's representative said that prices below $90 a barrel would hurt.
• A continued drop in oil prices, and a tough domestic economy, could jeopardize the position of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected on a populist platform and who faces re-election next year.
• Some analysts believe Hugo Chávez needs $100 a barrel to finance his expensive social programs and continue his international activism.

nytimes.com

It appears that low oil prices hurt the people who don't like us very much, foreign oil producers don't have the money to buy up our stuff in the U.S. and we don't really have any control over the supply of oil when OPEC's members control 40 percent of the world's oil exports.

Look for more OPEC drops in supply if the price of oil doesn't increase.

I think I will "help" out those suffering from low oil prices by not driving my car tomorrow.

Northern York County Regional police officer David Tome, was hit by awhile setting up equipment to map out Sunday's fatal crash. The officer died instantly, officials said.

I have received quite a few responses to my last post:
Tap water vs. bottled water

There are different requirements and different government agencies for bottled water and municipal supplies.

And while a municipal supply is a bricks and mortar entity where we can determine the source of water, know who owns it, request an analysis; bottled water is more of a free market item where you cannot as easily determine the source (has anyone seen water imported from China yet?), eats oil in transportation and creating bottles, and creates a waste recycle stream.

Because water is such an abundant resource, there is a greater potential to fool the consumer through bottling rather than piping unless the bottling industry is highly regulated and the consumer is throughly informed

Cindy McCain visits Republican volunteers working on the phone banks at the Victory Center in Springettsbury Township, York.

A tour of the York County Heritage Trust's 34th Annual Oyster Festival and Colonial Days with a sampling of the oysters.

Interesting Environmental Working Group study:
Bottled Water Quality Investigation: 10 Major Brands, 38 Pollutants

From the report:

• Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry does not disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts.


• Two of 10 brands tested, Walmart's and Giant's (this appears to not be the Pa. Giant chain) store brands, bore the chemical signature of standard municipal water treatment -- a cocktail of chlorine disinfection byproducts, and for Giant water, even fluoride. In other words, this bottled water was chemically indistinguishable from tap water.


• Typical cost of bottled water is $3.79 per gallon, 1,900 times the cost of public tap water.

Bottled water is poorly regulated and 1,900 times the cost of tap water, what a deal.

York Water Company's 2008 water quality report for tap water.

America didn't become the greatest nation on earth by spreading the wealth, we became the greatest nation on earth by creating new wealth. (McCain at last night's debate.)

This is a key phrase motivating both campaigns and the undercurrent of voter despair.

Before globalization, creating new wealth meant capitalization resulting in more domestic jobs. Today that end more often means "spreading" wealth and power to China, and other developing nations with cheap labor pools and sending our energy dollars to oil producing nations in a global oil market.

It is no longer a simple formula of trickle down economics. It's more rolling pin economics where the roller pin has an oval shape and the dough is spread thin where it is least profitable.

That is the reality of global free trade and the dough in the United States is getting thinner. As some of the bakers get stronger and beat away the other bakers, a few fat bakers roll all the dough.

However, the free market in the United States has always been balanced with a democracy that once the majority believes it is no longer prospering, moves to conserve it's resources.

The old-school conservative thinking that motivated my grandparents to save rolls of string and hoard things in their basement long after the depression was over is different from modern conservative thought.

My "conservative" grandparents would have been repulsed at people who drive huge SUV's and demand drilling when the future of oil is a one way downward spiral. My grandfather would be in the garage retrofitting a bicycle with a lawnmower engine when gasoline got over $2 a gallon. He was a successful small business owner whose employees worked for him for decades and never desired a union even when they were petitioned by a local.

Beneath the blind moral eye of the fat bakers who rule a "free market", those who eat the cookies are always the one who call the shots in the end.

What we use and don't use - in our innovation we change the play of the game.

Jan Protopapus, a middle-school teacher living in Codorus Township, excels at gurmat sangee - the art of singing and playing the hymns of the sacred Sikh scripture in the prescribed rags, or melodic modes of classical, medieval Indian music.

Projectors have come a long way from huge multi-filament power sucking tungsten bulbs 50 years ago in mechanical movie projectors that weighed the same as a small car.

The waste infrared heat from these bulbs would fry a modern projector. These projectors often had secondary bulbs to read the sound track and power sucking vacuum tubes to interpret the analog sound track image from the film.

Then came digital projectors that shoot light from really expansive exotic bulbs through LCD panels. The bulbs are expensive because they are very precise, have rare materials, and it's a great revenue stream. Replacing the bulb is almost as expensive as the projector and they last about 2000 hours.

Texas Instruments is marketing DLP® picture technology. With millions of tiny mirrors on a single chip, DLP®.

Think LED, cool running, 10,000 hour bulbs with little color decay over the lifespan, and lower power consumption.

A video produced by Texas instruments about the technology, that includes a presentation DLP® projector that can fit in your hand.

Dell began marketing a tiny Texas Instruments DLP® projector, the MS109s, for $499. Which if the bulb lasts $10,000 hours, it would basically be a disposable projector.

The 50 ANSI lumens (maximum) rating seems low when 1,000 lumens is a minimum for leaving the lights up in a small meeting room.

Here is a list of other manufacturers

Maybe someone will buy one and report back to us.

Rev. Ann Seitz-Brown packs up her bike at Saint Paul Lutheran Church in West Manchester Township to head head home to Paradise Lutheran Church, in Paradise Township, Wednesday.

Area churches met for an Energy Conservation for York County Congregation program sponsored by the Interfaith Coalition on Energy.

Seits-Brown said that her congregation is considering a community garden next year to help members with food prices and reduce the amount of oil used to transport fuel. She adding, that instead of paying someone to mow grass they can grow food.

The minister also said that she has taken to her bike instead of driving to the gym for exercise.

Several staff members from William Penn High School and members of their churches gather to help board up a house where a fire killed four members of a student's family last year.

A company in Holland is planning on producing aviation fuel from algae.

A fast growing, CO2 eating biofuel, that won't dive up the price of food like corn based ethanol and it's green mass by-product can be sold as feed for fish.

The inventor suggests building algae fuel farms next to sources of CO2, like power plants.

news.bbc.co.uk

I saw one of these parked along a street. The nearest Global Electric Motorcars (GEM) dealership to York (sold through select Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep dealers) is in New Jersey. GEM is a 100% owned subsidiary of Chrysler.

The fully electric vehicle can travel about 40 miles on a charge and is available in cargo carrying versions as well as a six passenger tiny bus version. The vehicles are engineered to meet federal safety requirements for street-legal operation as a low-speed vehicle (LSV). and limited to a top speed of 25 mph to meet Federal Low-Speed Vehicle requirements.

GEM cars can be driven on most public roads that are posted at 35 mph or less, in states that have approved the use of neighborhood electric vehicles.

Note the New York State limited use license plate.

Last week I went into Action Motorsports, in York, for a new pair of winter riding gloves. I asked John, the owner, how the economy was affecting him and he said, when people can't do anything about the economy, they ride. It seemed to be better advice than murdering yourself and six family members as a California man did yesterday over his financial problems.

I was sitting in this big, uncomfortable chair in the Adirondack Park yesterday on a random motorcycle ride north and I came to a conclusion about the economy. Maybe it has to all come apart and return to local economies where people know each other and know who they are doing business with, paying and sustaining each other with work, responsibility and respect.

Globalization and monopolies seem to be killing each other and the base they feed off of. We live in a broken economy that operates on credit, and we are attempting to repair it with more credit.

An illusion that cannot be sustained.

I decided to dump my credit cards as much as possible. I have never used them for credit. I just use the dividend cards and I don't like change. I am considered a "deadbeat" customer by the credit card industry because I don't get into debt.

Today, the average family owes roughly $8,000 on their credit cards. This debt has helped generate record profits for the credit card industry -- last year, more than $30 billion before taxes. pbs.org

Adding to that, I am giving my local merchants a 2..3..%? stimulus in a weak economy on every purchase that credit card companies charge them for the service on my credit card purchases.

I feel free. None of my purchasing history is tracked. As the change piles up, I take it to a self checkout at a local retailer and dump it in.

Going back to cash has been a rewarding exercise of simplicity in a complicated economic environment.

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I am sitting in Rome, New York.

Rome has seen better times. Property taxes here are about twice what I pay in Manchester Township. I am currently ten minutes from The New York State Thruway.

Abertis Infraestructuras SA of Spain and Citigroup Inc. withdrew their $12.8 billion offer to operate the 537-mile (864-kilometer) Pennsylvania Turnpike last week after state lawmakers delayed a decision on legislation needed to allow the transaction to go forward. bloomberg

Maybe Citi is busy now trying to scuttle a deal between Wachovia and Wells-Fargo (AP) who they claim jumped their deal. The deal Citi is trying to stop between Wells-Fargo and Wachovia would save taxpayers from paying billions from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to bail-out another bank.

New York is struggling with the same issues with roads and bridges as Pennsylvania and is looking for new ways of funding. Options include a new push to lease out The New York State Thruway and the Tappan Zee Bridge, golf courses, state parks and the lottery. watertowndailytimes.com

I like the idea of leasing when in the case of the Tappan Zee Bridge that is in need of replacement. In this scenario, a company must front the costs and will reap benefit over time.

In other scenarios, the inefficiency of government (our tax dollars) is transferred into private profit and long term uncertainty at the whim of private control.

The question remains. Can we trust the private sector with running our infrastructure any more than inefficient government. At least with government, I still have a vote.

I headed out on motorcycle trip with a buddy and currently I'm sitting in Rome, New York. (about 300 miles north of York, Pa.)

I usually store all my electronics in Ziplock bags. The Dell Mini 9 fits comfortably in a gallon Ziplock bag with room to spare.

Long distance motorcycle traveling appears to have dropped off across the northeast, perhaps it's because night temperatures in the mountains have dipping into the low 30's.

Check back for updates as I start to use this mini computer.

I love small cars and motorcycles. Tools that can do the job with the smallest footprint for space and energy consumption.

I use Linux/Ubuntu on a Shuttle Computer Small Form-Factor system for my desktop that is about the size of a shoe box. For work, I am supplied with a robust Dell Inspiron 9400 that can handle video tasks. It's a laptop with a screen almost as large as my desktop screen, but wonderful for video editing.

A couple months ago, I resurrected a vintage Dell Inspiron 5000e with Windows 98 for my ultra mobile/higher risk needs like motorcycle trips. It was cobbled together with a pre-release version of Windows 2000. Although really slow with 128 MB of RAM, it was functional for browser functions.

In September, Dell debuted the Inspiron Mini 9, known as a UMPC (also known as a netbook. The tiny laptop measures Width: 9.13" (232mm) Height: 1.07" (27.2mm) front / 1.25" (31.7mm) back Depth: 6.77" (172mm). This computer is so tiny you could almost fit it into a pair of cargo pants with a large pocket.

I came to the conclusion that phone browsers aren't yet up to the task of doing all the tasks that I can do with a desktop/laptop. The only device that does this would be a mirror of my desktop/laptop, only smaller. The device would have a universal operating system like Windows XP, something that can easily accommodate Verizon's USB broadband and most of the mindset you have in place for working on a desktop/laptop.

The Mini 9 uses less power than a laptop and much less than a desktop. It uses Intel's smallest and lowest power consuming processor, the Atom. According to Intel, the chip is built with the world's smallest transistors.

The Mini 9 doesn't have a traditional hard drive with a motor and other moving parts. It uses chips to store permanent memory adding to it's frugal power consumption. Chips are also not subject to shock and the failures of mechanical hard drives in mobile applications.

My experience so far is 4+ hours of straight run time from a really tiny battery pack. The whole computer only weighs 2.28 lbs. (1.035 kg).

My neighbor dog Juno has a passion for rides. Any open car door is fair game. Frightened of the scooter at first, he is now ready for a ride.

Chuck parked his full-sized Chevy truck (11 mpg) over the Summer and has commuted to work with a 100+ mpg Honda Elite 80 Scooter.

For most of the past month, Chuck has been using old lawn mower/boat gas to power the Honda. The gas went unused this summer when I started mowing three lawns on my block with an electric lawn mower.

The local chapter of the Guardian Angels patrolled the streets of York, Pa. in uniform for the first time.

About 30 residents at the Barbara J. Egan Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Shrewsbur participated in the 9th annual Balloons Around the World, an event designed to highlight the act of giving and to showcase balloon art.

Canine Meadows, a new dog park at John C. Rudy County Park, is a popular place for dogs and people to socialize.

The world's most fuel efficient couple, John and Helen Taylor, have broken the current world record for lowest fuel consumption across the 48 contiguous United States averaging 58.82 miles to the gallon.

The Taylors drove the new VW Jetta TDI 9,419 miles, exceeding 60 mpg on several legs of the record-setting run, spending only 6.9 cents per mile (total was $653). prnewswire.com