The process is challenging and complex. First a synthetic gas is made from pure oxygen and methane, the main component of natural gas, which is cleansed of sulfur, metals and other impurities, under intense pressure and heat. Then the synthetic gas is put in giant reactors that make a synthetic crude through the Fischer-Tropsch process. The process essentially forces heated synthetic gas to react with a catalyst, typically cobalt, to convert into a liquid hydrocarbon. Finally that liquid is refined into one fuel or another. The process is far more complex than that at a typical refinery, so the plant is much more expensive to build and operate. Alfred Luaces, a refining specialist at the consultancy IHS, said a conventional oil refinery could be built for $50,000 per barrel of capacity, less than half of what Sasol says it is willing to spend on the proposed Louisiana plant.
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Sasol Betting Big on Gas-to-Liquid Plant in U.S. - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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These are areas with lots of natural gas, and little chance of getting it to market, save for liquefication, but even then lacking access to ports.
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Sasol is building a gas-to-liquids plant in Uzbekistan with the Malaysian oil company Petronas. It is working with Chevron to build another plant in Nigeria.
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Rick Manner, a vice president at consultancy KBC Advanced Technologies who has contributed to gas-to-liquids studies for Sasol and other companies, estimated that the projects must keep capital costs at $100,000 for every barrel a day of production capacity to be worthwhile economically at current prices of about $100 a barrel for oil and $4 per thousand cubic feet for natural gas.
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Mr. Louw, Sasol’s Qatar president, said that the Oryx plant was designed to be profitable with oil at $25 a barrel. That implies a very low long-term price for the natural gas feedstock. He would not specify what Sasol pays its Qatari partner for gas, but he said it was “not zero.”
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How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp
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Tencent, Foxconn & China Harmony Unite to Build Smart Cars - Analyst Blog - NASDAQ.com - 0 views
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Tencent, Foxconn & China Harmony Unite to Build Smart Cars - Analyst Blog
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Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags
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After years in which a combination of fiscal pressures and a complacent trust in the alliance’s protection may have led them to drop their guard,
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many countries are building from a very limited ability and remain years away from fielding anything resembling a formidable force against a military as large as Russia’s.
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NATO asks member states to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their armed forces, yet only a handful of them actually do. Estonia, the small Baltic state at the alliance’s far eastern edge, is one of them, and Poland, by far the largest and richest country on that flank, is at 1.95 percent.
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Latvia and Lithuania are spending less than 1 percent, though both have indicated they intend to ratchet up to 2 percent by 2020
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But it will be a decade before the full impact of this modernization is felt in the field, he said.
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The plan NATO has agreed on — to set up forward supply bases on the alliance’s eastern front in which 4,000 or so troops could be deployed within 48 hours — might be useful in combating a small, stealth insurgency, like the masked gunmen who arrived in Ukraine to set off that crisis, but would be useless in the face of an invasion. “What is required is to be able to hold off any aggression for at least a couple of weeks, to buy some time and provide some sort of sanctuary for reinforcements”
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In recent years, Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops for exercises just across their borders.
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When the Baltic states entered NATO a decade ago, they were urged not to spend their limited resources on building large standing armies, but to depend on others in the alliance to come to their aid in an emergency. Instead, the Baltic countries and other former Soviet satellite states focused their military spending on building specialties that they could offer the alliance, such as Estonia’s focus on cybersecurity
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Deepening divide over Elbe dredging | Germany | DW.COM | 19.12.2016 - 0 views
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Deepening divide over Elbe dredging
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The Marco Polo, for example, carries 16,000 containers and has a draft (the vertical distance between waterline and ship's keel) of 16 meters. Given present river depths and tides, such ships can only enter Hamburg at certain times and when not fully loaded.
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Tidal range is a prime cause for erosion, which previous river dredging, as well as waves generated by passing ships, have exacerbated
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As the river deepens, more seawater from the North Sea flows at a faster rate towards Hamburg, bringing sediment that builds up on the riverbed. The Hamburg Port Authority dredges the river to counteract the build up, which cost taxpayers 120 million euros ($125 million) in 2015.
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The two projects amount to an expensive redundancy, Siegert said, with the JadeWeserPort costing $1.6 billion and the Elbe project an additional $940 million. "This is the reason for our protest: They decided on the first port, and now they should coordinate traffic, so that the really large ships can go to Wilhelmshaven or, under certain restrictions, to Hamburg."
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Why Is Zambia So Poor? And Will Things Ever Get Better? - 0 views
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Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.
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For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.
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Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company
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At its peak, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines company employed more than 65,000 Zambians and carried out services like water delivery and waste collection for five cities in the Copper Belt Province.
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Mining employment has dropped to just 30,000, half of its glory-days peak, and the job of maintaining all that company housing and infrastructure has reverted back to the government.
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The stats identify Switzerland as Zambia’s primary export market. This is not an indicator that Zambia hosts a thriving chocolate and suspenders sector, but rather that its copper trades are booked in the jurisdiction where they are least likely to be taxed.
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Many of the mining companies pay just 0.6 percent royalties to Zambia, far below the already-meager industry standard of three percent.
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And then there’s the Chinese. They arrived like a well-packed picnic, everything in shipping crates ready to be unpacked. Their own materials, their own equipment, their own workers, their own fences. If you were designing a foreign investment not to benefit the host community, this is what it would look like.
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This is Namwile Uzondile, the director of a rural health education project.
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Last year Namwile conducted a survey of prostitutes here in Kitwe, and found that at least half of them had education certificates, but couldn’t find work. Most had been married off early, 15 or 16, and since then had either left their husbands or lost them to AIDS.
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First, you go to the tribal chief. Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief.
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In Zambia most of the chiefs require a gift just to get a meeting. This might mean taking them lunch at a restaurant in Lusaka, or it could mean buying their daughter a car—it’s up to them.
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Another reason Zambia lacks skills is that some parts of the workforce operate as cartels. Take lawyers. Zambia only has 1,000 of them, and they’re concentrated where the money is: Lusaka (government), Copper Belt (mining) and Livingstone (safari tourists).
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Last year, only six lawyers were admitted to the bar out of 164 who took the exam. The year before that, it was 16 out of 145. Keep in mind, these aren’t people coming in off the streets. These are people who have a law degree.
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More than 60 percent of Zambia’s government revenue comes from the copper mines.
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Taxing all this informal activity would be costly in both resources and voter goodwill. In 2012, Zambia collected just $2.3 million in income taxes from its citizens.
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It goes as high up as you want to follow it. Michael Sata, the president of Zambia, appointed his uncle the finance minister, his nephew the deputy finance minister, his niece the local government minister, and cousins as ambassador to Japan and chief justice.
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Zambia’s cabinet has ballooned to 20 ministers and 47 deputy ministers, the largest in Africa. With salaries three to four times higher than opposition MPs and each ministerial post bundled with perks like a company car, free fuel, house servants, and mobile phone talk-time, you get the feeling politicians aren’t jumping from opposition into government on moral sentiment alone.
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But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around.
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In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything.
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Now she goes all NGO. “Little government capacity,” she says, is the nicest way to put it. “There are simply no systems for routine government services,” she says. Getting a license, a permit, certificates, approvals to start work, visas for expats to fly down here—nothing is in one place, nothing is fast or easy.
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And that’s just the bureaucracy. Then there are the cops that pull you over to ask for 50 kwacha ($10); the schools with slots reserved for paying parents; the hospitals that swear the earliest appointment, the only available medicine, is six months away until you reach into your pocket.
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“Sometimes we have to pay for the inspectors to come to our mines,” Jane says.
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The conversation goes like this: Jane tells the local certification body that she needs an inspector to sign off for a permit. The local certification body tells her that they would be happy to come out to the site, but they don’t have fuel for their cars, or enough petty cash to pay per diems. Jane offers to pay their costs, but only their costs, and the payments aren’t related to clearing the inspection.
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The company has even paid the police to follow up on complaints or to investigate thefts. “They say, ‘We don’t have this in our budget’ or ‘We’ll need you to pay for it,’” Jane says. So the company fixes the police cars, covers their travel expenses, treats them to lunch.
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“We tell them, ‘The company I work for, we’re not going to pay up.’ But at the end of the day, they know you’re on a short timeline, and they aren’t.”
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Thomas’ family told him his nephews didn’t need to be in school. From their perspective, that’s not totally irrational. In a country with so few formal jobs and so much competition for getting them, I can see how spending hundreds of hours, thousands of kwachas, on education would seem superfluous. Thomas’ daughter wants to become a lawyer. You could almost forgive Thomas if he told her that the bar exam failure rate is more than 90 percent, so what’s the use?
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International investors pledged $750 million last year to build infrastructure.
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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement.
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Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
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Six years after that first meeting, Levin and Randolph are trying to put this conception of character into action in their schools. In the process, they have found themselves wrestling with questions that have long confounded not just educators but anyone trying to nurture a thriving child or simply live a good life. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Which qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to a successful and autonomous adulthood? And are the answers to those questions the same in Harlem and in Riverdale?
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According to a report that KIPP issued last spring, only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.
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As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.
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“The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach,” he told me, “is it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment.”
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Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s.
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People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”
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Last winter, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grades took the 24-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The results were discussed by teachers and administrators, but they weren’t shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren’t labeled a “report card.”
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Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” he explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”
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She and her team of researchers gave middle-school students at Riverdale and KIPP a variety of psychological and I.Q. tests. They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.
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The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, while the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin have chosen for their schools lean much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.
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The topic for the assembly was heroes, and a half-dozen students stood up in front of their classmates — about 350 kids, in all — and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen:
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I came to Witter’s class to observe something that Levin was calling “dual-purpose instruction,” the practice of deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson.
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It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can.
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The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
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The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman - The Atlantic - 1 views
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Both Bowman and Calvaruso knew something about “lean” manufacturing techniques—the style of factory management invented by Toyota whereby everyone has a say in critiquing and improving the way work gets done, with a focus on eliminating waste. Lean management is not a new concept, but outside of car making, it hasn’t caught on widely in the United States. It requires an open, collegial, and relentlessly self-critical mind-set among workers and bosses alike—a mind-set that is hard to create and sustain.
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If the people who design dishwashers sit at their desks in one building, and the people who sell them to retailers and consumers sit at their desks in another building, and the people who make the dishwashers are in a different country and speak a different language—you never realize that the four screws should disappear, let alone come up with a way they can.
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Levi Strauss used to have more than 60 domestic blue-jeans plants; today it contracts out work to 16 and owns none, and it’s hard to imagine mass-market clothing factories ever coming back in significant numbers—the work is too basic.
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All that said, big factories have a way of creating larger economies around them—they have a “multiplier effect,” in economic parlance
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The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The Insourcing Boom
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But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday.
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By 1955, Appliance Park employed 16,000 workers. By the 1960s, the sixth building had been built, the union workforce was turning out 60,000 appliances a week,
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On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory.
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In the 1960s, as the consumer-product world we now live in was booming, the Harvard economist Raymond Vernon laid out his theory of the life cycle of these products,
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Amana, for instance, introduced the first countertop microwave—the Radarange, made in Amana, Iowa—in 1967, priced at $495. Today you can buy a microwave at Walmart for $49 (the equivalent of a $7 price tag on a 1967 microwave)—and almost all the ones you’ll see there, a variety of brands and models, will have been shipped in from someplace where hourly wages have historically been measured in cents rather than dollars.
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Even as recently as 2000, a typical Chinese factory worker made 52 cents an hour.
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Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum
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These are headed for Mexico, to Navistar’s stamping plant there.Continue reading the main story
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Now, they are trying to respond, making lighter, stronger steel in a bid to retain one of their most important customers, the automakers.
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chief executive of Severstal North America, the United States subsidiary of Russia’s Severstal Group, which now owns the Rouge steel operations.
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At Severstal’s Dearborn factory, for example, carmakers including Ford and others account for 70 percent of sales,
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The shift to aluminum is gaining momentum. Automakers are under increasing pressure to meet strict new fuel-economy standards by 2025
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United States Steel has invested $400 million in a joint venture with Kobe Steel of Japan to make advanced high-strength steel in a Leipsic, Ohio, factory expected to produce 500,000 tons annually.
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Inside Severstal’s steel mill on a cold January day, hissing heavy machinery removed oxides from steel sheets, reducing their thickness to the equivalent of five human hairs.
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For nearly a century, Ford’s River Rouge factory and its neighboring steel mill have worked in close harmony
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Steel makers argue that they still have advantages in price — aluminum can cost as much as three times more — and flexibility, both for the manufacturer and the mechanic who will be fixing the car.“When you build a mass-produced vehicle, you really need to think about the consequences of the supply chain and repair and insurance costs,” Mr. Dey said.
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new federal fuel-efficiency standards that will require a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a significant boost from the roughly 25 m.p.g. that vehicles average today.
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“Sometimes there is a push from the aluminum side, and they win over with a particular model, and steel tends to be the comeback kid, with more innovation,” said Felix Schuler, a Munich-based partner in the Boston Consulting Group’s metals and mining practice.
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What seems certain is that ordinary steel is likelier to lose out to its new and improved cousin than to aluminum, Mr. Schuler said.
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Novelis is investing nearly $550 million to upgrade plants in Oswego, N.Y., and Nachterstedt, Germany, and to build a new factory in Changzhou, China, to triple its capacity from a year ago to 900,000 tons annually.
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Alcoa, the country’s biggest aluminum producer, is investing about $670 million in its Iowa, Tennessee and Saudi Arabia facilities.Continue reading the main story
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“Henry Ford was a control freak, and he wanted to control as much of the manufacturing as possible,” Mr. Casey said. “He made the steel, he made the glass, he made the tires.”
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Robert J. Shiller attributes Japan's incipient recovery - and weak growth elsewhere - t... - 0 views
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The Global Economy’s Tale Risks
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Fluctuations in the world’s economies are largely due to the stories we hear and tell about them. These popular, emotionally relevant narratives sometimes inspire us to go out and spend, start businesses, build new factories and office buildings, and hire employees; at other times, they put fear in our hearts and impel us to sit tight, save our resources, curtail spending, and reduce risk. They either stimulate our “animal spirits” or muffle them.
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The output gap for the world’s major advanced economies, as calculated by the IMF, remains disappointing, at -3.2% in 2013, which is less than half-way back to normal from 2009, the worst year of the global financial crisis, when the gap was -5.3%.
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Think of the story of the real-estate boom in the United States and other countries in the first half of the 2000’s. This was a story not of a “bubble”; rather, the boom was a triumph of capitalist enterprise in a new millennium.
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These stories were so powerful because a huge number of people were psychologically – and financially – invested in them
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With the abrupt end of the boom in 2006, that ego-boosting story also ended.
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To understand why economic recovery (if not that of the stock market) has remained so weak since 2009, we need to identify which stories have been affecting popular psychology.
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The iEconomy - Nissan's Move to U.S. Offers Lessons for Tech Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Japanese and other foreign companies account for more than 40 percent of cars built in the United States, employing about 95,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more among parts suppliers.
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The United States gained these jobs through a combination of public and Congressional pressure on Japan, “voluntary” quotas on car exports from Japan and incentives like tax breaks that encouraged Japanese automakers to build factories in America.
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The government could also encourage domestic production of technologies, including display manufacturing and advanced semiconductor fabrication, that would nurture new industries. “Instead, we let those jobs go to Asia, and then the supply chains follow, and then R&D follows, and soon it makes sense to build everything overseas,” he said. “If Apple or Congress wanted to make the valuable parts of the iPhone in America, it wouldn’t be hard.”
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Last year, Brazilian politicians used subsidies and the threat of continued high tariffs on imports to persuade Foxconn — which makes smartphones and computers in Asia for dozens of technology companies — to start producing iPhones, iPads and other devices in a factory north of São Paulo.
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“Closing our border is a 20th-century thought, and it will only weaken the economy over the long term,”
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Silicon Valley Tries to Remake the Idea Machine - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Silicon Valley Tries to Remake the Idea Machine
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The federal government now spends $126 billion a year on R. and D., according to the National Science Foundation. (It’s pocket change compared with the $267 billion that the private sector spends.) Asian economies now account for 34 percent of global spending; America’s share is 30 percent.
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Perhaps more crucial, the invention of much of the stuff that really created jobs and energized the economy — the Internet, the mouse, smartphones, among countless other ideas — was institutionalized. Old-fashioned innovation factories, like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, were financed by large companies and operated under the premise that scientists should be given large budgets, a supercomputer or two and plenty of time to make discoveries and work out the kinks of their quixotic creations.
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“It’s the unique ingredient of the U.S. business model — not just smart scientists in universities, but a critical mass of very smart scientists working in the neighborhood of commercial businesses,
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Start-ups became so cheap to create — founders can just rent space in the cloud from Amazon instead of buying servers and buildings to house them — that it became easier and more efficient for big companies to simply buy new ideas rather than coming up with the framework for inventing them. Some of Google’s largest businesses, like Android and Maps, were acquired.
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Microsoft Research just announced the opening of a skunk-works group called Special Projects.
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All of their parent companies, however, are determined to learn from the mistakes that Xerox and AT&T made, namely failing to capitalize on their own research. It’s Valley lore, after all, that companies like Apple and Fairchild Semiconductor built their fame and fortune on research done at Xerox and Bell.
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Astro Teller
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Google X does the inverse: It picks products to make, then hires people specifically to build them: artists and philosophers and designers, many of whom don’t even know what they’ll be working on until they join.
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The word ‘basic’ implies ‘unguided,’ and ‘unguided’ is probably best put in government-funded universities rather than industry.”
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EU energy market: Pipe dream - FT.com - 0 views
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EU energy market: Pipe dream
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A more competitive market also means importing new sources of gas from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as building terminals for liquefied natural gas.
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France’s nuclear industry was also reticent about cheap renewable energy streaming into the French grid on an uncertain timetable.
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Spain’s grid is barely connected to France so its wind farms cannot export their production when it exceeds domestic demand. Similarly, solar and wind energy from southern Italy is wasted because it is not effectively linked to the industrial north.
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Full energy convergence needs more than interconnectors. Widely divergent electricity prices are often determined by national tax rates. Grids that can respond to demand further afield in a continent-wide “supergrid” will need more direct (rather than alternating) current infrastructure. While it took Spain and France more than three decades to build a 64.5km interconnection, some 52,000km of lines need to be built or upgraded across the continent.
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Poland argues that Gazprom has confidential data on each country it deals with, knowing its gas prices and infrastructure vulnerabilities. It can then use this data to its advantage, pushing some countries into more onerous contracts than others.
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The advantage of a hub would become more apparent when new supplies from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean are integrated into the market by means of the so-called southern corridor supply route.
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Geoffrey Feasey of the European Network of Transmission Systems Operators for Electricity says one-third of the most vital projects to connect Europe are being held up by “permitting and public acceptance”.
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China's Economic Empire - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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China has also invested heavily in building infrastructure, undertaking huge hydroelectric projects like the Merowe Dam on the Nile in Sudan — the biggest Chinese engineering project in Africa — and Ecuador’s $2.3 billion Coca Codo Sinclair Dam. And China is currently involved in the building of more than 200 other dams across the planet, according to International Rivers, a nonprofit environmental organization.
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China has become the world’s leading exporter; it also surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest trading nation in 2012.
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annual investment from China to the European Union grew from less than $1 billion annually before 2008 to more than $10 billion in the past two years. And in the United States, investment surged from less than $1 billion in 2008 to a record high of $6.7 billion in 2012, according to the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm. Last year, Europe was the destination for 33 percent of China’s foreign direct investment.
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Fear of Fracking by Jeffrey Frankel - Project Syndicate - 0 views
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CAMBRIDGE – Against all expectations, US emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since peaking in 2007, have fallen by 12% as of 2012, back to 1995 levels. The primary reason, in a word, is “fracking.”
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Just ten years ago, the natural-gas industry was so sure that domestic production was reaching its limit that it made large investments in terminals to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). Yet fracking has increased supply so rapidly that these facilities are now being converted to export LNG.
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Natural gas emits only half as much CO2 as coal, and occupies a rapidly increasing share of electricity generation – up 37% since 2007, while coal’s share has plummeted by 25%.
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Meanwhile, the share of coal – the dirtiest fuel – has been rising, not falling, in the rest of the world’s energy mix.
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Moving beyond economics, America’s reduction in net energy imports – which have already fallen by one-half since 2007 – means that its foreign policy will be less constrained by events in the Middle East. In Europe, the new technology could similarly break Russia’s politically troublesome stranglehold on natural-gas supplies.
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Put differently, if the world continues to build coal-fired power plants at the current rate, those plants will still be around in 2050, regardless of what other technologies become viable in the meantime.
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Even a serious fracking mishap would be unlikely to cause as much damage as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in 2011, or coal-mining tragedies that play out dramatically in frequent explosions and collapses (and more insidiously in the form of lung disease, water pollution, and soil erosion).
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Read, I, Pencil | Library of Economics and Liberty - 0 views
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Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.
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Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
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a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon
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The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California.
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The slats are waxed and kiln dried again.
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The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces.
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Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.
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Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.
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The graphite is mined in Ceylon.
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The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
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My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are.
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Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
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My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain. RP.18
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An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide
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Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others.
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There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.
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Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me.
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There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found.
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For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
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" Articles EconLog EconTalk Books Encyclopedia Guides Search "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" A selected essay reprint Home | Books | Read | Selected essay reprint Read, Leonard E. (1898-1983) BIO Display paragraphs in this essay containing: Search essay Editor/Trans. First Pub. Date Dec. 1958 Publisher/Edition Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. Pub. Date 1999 Comments Pamphlet PRINT EMAIL CITE COPYRIGHT Start PREVIOUS 4 of 5 NEXT End "