Daily Archives: March 1, 2007

Eric, we hardly knew ye!

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moulds%20122807.jpgSo, the Texans traded a low draft pick last summer to Buffalo for the contract rights to veteran wide receiver Eric Moulds in a much ballyhooed deal. The theory of the deal was that the veteran receiver would help take the pressure off of the Texans’ stud receiver, Andre Johnson.
So much for that theory.
Meanwhile, the guy who Moulds replaced came within a couple of minutes of playing in the Super Bowl this past season.
Even if such deals don’t work out, it’s a good thing for the Texans to be taking well-calculated risks in attempting to improve the chronically underachieving team. However, regular readers of this blog knew that the Moulds deal was probably a loser well before Moulds ever played a down for the Texans. Why didn’t the Texans’ personnel evaluators realize that Moulds was washed up before the team blew a five million dollar signing bonus on him? That’s the question that Bob McNair ought to be asking himself this morning.
At least the Texans cut their losses on Moulds early. In the low expectation world of Texansville, that signals progress.

Al Gore’s big utility bill

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al_gore.jpgDrudge and parts of the political blogosphere made a big deal out of Al Gore’s supposed hypocrisy in personally consuming more than average amounts of energy while advocating conservation of energy to reduce global warming. But my sense is that James H. Joyner, Jr. has the right perspective on Gore’s energy usage:

Regardless of what Al Gore preaches about these matters, the way he lives strikes me as reasonable. He was of the manor born, to be sure, but he has earned a lot of money on his own. He has every right to a ginormous house, a fleet of cars, and to be flown around the world in private planes to speak out against the dangers of global warming. While itís funny in microcosm, it strikes me as a perfectly defensible trade-off to use a thousand times more energy than the average guy in an effort to influence macro-level energy and environmental policy.
Where Gore and I differ is that my aim is for more people to get to live like Gore. While environmental degradation in general and global warming in particular are real problems, certainly a serious case can be made that they pale in comparison with the ravages of poverty. Further, if millions of people not starving to death isnít its own reward, UC-Berkeley professor emeritus of energy and resources Jack Hollander explains in The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environmentís Number One Enemy, that, contrary to conventional wisdom, as societies become more affluent, they produce less pollution. Thatís not particularly surprising, when you think about it, as those whose basic human needs are met have both the inclination and resources to worry about cleaning up their environment.

Read the entire piece.

Peak Oil — Much ado about nothing?

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peak_oil_flat.jpgVaclav Smil is a distinguished professor of economics at the University of Manitoba and, based on this TCS Daily op-ed, doesn’t think much of Peak Oilers, including well-known Houston-based Peak Oil advocate, Matt Simmons:

Simmons claims that Saudis have falsified their oil reserve data so much that in reality they have only a fraction of the claimed oil left in the ground, and that their, and the world’s, largest oilfield, al-Ghawar, has been so damaged by waterflooding (used for enhanced recovery of oil) that it faces imminent and massive extraction downturn. And yet Saudis will be investing nearly $50 billion between 2007 and 2011 to get this nonexistent oil to the global market. Perhaps they know something that Simmons is not aware of (these days it is, after all, de rigueur to say only bad things about Saudis).

Smil concludes by reminding us of something that is not well understood by the political forces that frequently attempt to heap even more taxes on the energy industry — that is, that investing in oil and gas exploration is not necessarily the lucrative long-term investment that many believe:

Finally, a practical reminder: If there is an imminent peak of oil extraction, should not then the prospective shortage of that increasingly precious fuel result in relentlessly rising prices and should not buying a barrel of oil and holding onto it be an unbeatable investment? But a barrel of a high-quality crude, say West Texas intermediate, bought at $12.23/b in 1976 as a nest-egg for retirement and sold before the end of 2006 at $60/b would have earned (even when assuming no storage costs) about 1.2% a year, a return vastly inferior to almost any guaranteed investment certificate and truly a miserable gain when compared with virtually any balanced stock market fund. And a freedom-at-55 investor who bought that barrel at 30 years of age in 1980 and sold in 2005 would have realized a nearly forty per cent loss on his precious investment. Being a true believer in imminent peak oil may be fine as a provocative notion but not as a means of securing a comfortable retirement.