Beyond the usual concern that the total or partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz drives up the price of the stuff we put in our cars, there is a concern only slowly bubbling to public consciousness -- that it will also drive up the cost of fertilizer and accordingly of food. The traditional route for the manufacture of fertilizer is through what chemists call the Haber-Bosch process, which makes ammonia, which can be used as a fertilizer in itself or can be combined with other stuff for more elaborate fertilizers. There has been a lot of talk about moving beyond Haber-Bosch, finding alternative ways of making ammonia and growing the world's food, in part precisely because natural gas is an input, and relatedly because CO₂ is a major byproduct of that process. A move toward alternative processes is a move toward a low or net zero carbon emissions world. It is certainly possible that even a partial blockage of Hormuz will kick-start the implementation of alternatives...
Posts
A recent article in SLATE bore the questioning headline, "What happens if oil doesn't recover?". The question is a timely one. Oil prices have taken a beating of late. I have a precis of the reasons why in a recent post here about Berkshire Hathaway and Occidental Petroleum, and won't recap that. The brief dip of near-month futures into negative prices -- companies were paying good money to cancel deliveries of the stuff -- drew a lot of attention. But let's look at the big picture to fix the size of the drop. Through December 2019 the price of West Texas Intermediate rose slowly and, it seemed, steadily. It went from $55.86 per barrel when the month began to $61.40 at year's end. In January, before most of the western hemisphere even knew the word "Wuhan," the price began a decline. WTI ended January at $51.56. The decline became much more dramatic in February, down to $44.76. In March, it fell off a cliff, ending that month at $20.48, only a...
Suppose it was your assignment, dear reader, to set up a debate for some conference about "Crude Oil Consumption in the United States." Your debate, as part of that conference, would have to involve two reputable figures, two distinct points of view on that subject, and one proposition, on which your speakers would take respectively a "pro" and a "con" position. What kind of speakers might you look for, and what kind of proposition could best express the opposition you'd be trying to bring out? There are lots of approaches one might take of course....four occur to me. 1. Resolved: that in five years, the consumption of crude oil, per capita, will be greater than at present. 2. ... that in five years, the consumption of crude oil, overall, will be greater than at present. 3. ...that in five years, much of what is now accomplished through burning crude oil, or other carbon fuels, will be accomplished by alternative means. 4. ... that in ...
One already venerable theory of why crime rates fell in the 1990s: ROE v. WADE. The theory holds that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals (18 years or so after their unwanted births) than wanted children, and fewer unwanted children were born in the years subsequent to 1973 than in the years before it. This, rates of crime began to decline when they 'should' have. Here is more information on the theory and the evidence invoked to support it. I've recently encountered another view, though. Perhaps the decline was a matter of leaded versus unleaded gasoline. . In the magazine "Mother Jones" in 2013, Kevin Drum made the point that tying the crime rate to lead emissions has the economical virtue of explaining both the rise and the fall. "lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s," and violent crime rates rose along a dramatically similar curve with a 20 year lag. ROE v. WADE...