Thoughts on Revolution and Oil Disruption

Revolution is sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East.  The governments facing this spontaneous uprising are universally totalitarian.  Some have had good relations with the United States and some have not.  No one knows if the new governments will be more democratic or less, or if more democratic regimes will be less friendly to the United State and our allies.  Assume the worst, that anti-American, totalitarian, radicalized pro-Iranian governments replace current regimes.  What will this mean for oil output and prices?

I believe that after a temporary spike due to the fear of disruption of or actual disruption of supplies, output and production will resort to their pre-revolution trend.  My conclusion is based on two assumptions.  First, like their predecessors, the new regimes will attempt to maximize oil revenue.  This means setting a monopoly price through OPEC or some similar cartel.  These countries are poor, and long-run reduction of production below the optimal cartel price would reduce economic activity leading to greater discontent.  The new regimes would face counter revolution elements in their own government willing to supply oil to the rest of the world and these challengers would be able to promise bigger rewards to backers than the current regime based on increased oil production.  Second, although the new regimes would set prices through a cartel, they would have as much incentive to cheat on cartel prices as those they replace, making it difficult for the cartel to maintain production quotas.  In short, the revolutionary frenzy may be bad for the U.S. diplomatically, it will not mean a great deal economically.

Two Problems with Profiling

Profiling is a method of observing characteristics, actions and circumstances to draw conclusions about a person.  It is a useful tool that we all use every day.  Doctors build health profiles based on age, weight, race, sex and personal habits such as drinking and smoking.  Amazon books uses profiling to suggest books you might be interested in based on past purchases and current browsing. 

Profiling becomes controversial when race is one of the observed characteristics or when the profiler can legally use coercion on the profiled even when the profiled characteristic is statistically based.  Suppose Officer Holmes of the Arcadia Police Department observes that drug use has crept into his normally peaceful jurisdiction.  He travels to Gotham and notes that four times as many Hispanic males are arrested on drug charges than Asian males.  Based on that observation, he focuses his time and other police resources on Hispanic males to reduce drug related crime.  The problem could be one of reverse causality.  Perhaps more Hispanic males were arrested in the past because the police harbor prejudices against Hispanic males.  They are arrested more frequently because they are investigated more frequently.

Now assume that Officer Holmes has read scientifically conducted research based on surveys that finds that 12% of Hispanic males acknowledge illegal drug compared to 3% of Asian males.  He is scientifically justified in using race as a profiling characteristic, but problems remain.  In the course of his work, using race, sex, location and other behaviors to profile potential drug users, he observes 1,000 Hispanic males.  Of these, he stops and questions 270, and of these, he arrests and charges 60 with a drug related crime and all are convicted.  The remaining 210 Hispanic males were innocent and while they were only stopped and questioned, may resent Holmes’ behavior and grow to distrust the police.

Profiling becomes more objectionable as the ability to correctly identify offenders decreases and the level of coercion increases.  On January 8, 2011, Jared Loughner made himself notorious by killing six and wounding twelve in a failed assassination attempt of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  Some called for more stringent gun control.  Second Amendment supporters and gun owners argued that it would be wrong to inconvenience many gun owners for the actions of a single deranged man.  Others noting that friends, family, students and teachers had observed Loughner’s erratic behavior and on several occasions had called the police for assistance suggest that a stronger enforcement mechanism be developed to help youths with mental disorders and protect the public.

Let’s say that Arizona imposes a new law that that allows authorities to medicate youths profiled by behavioral characteristics as potentially violent.  Assume that researchers followed the behavior of 10,000 young adults and one in a thousand (10 young adults in our sample) have a disorder that will lead to acts of violence.  Now assume that we implement a system that correctly identifies 80% of those with potentially violent mental disorders (8 of the ten potentially violent young adults are identified.  Two are not.).  But there is a tradeoff.   In our example, there are 9,990 young adults who are not potentially violent yet one time in a hundred, or 99.9 times a young adult will be wrongly identified as being potentially violent and subject to forced mediation.  Is catching 8 of 10 potentially violent worth the cost of forcefully medicating nearly 100 who are not?  If this tradeoff is too high, how many wrongful forced medications will you tolerate to stop the violence these youths will cause?

Jeffrey on Social Welfare Programs

(HT Drudge Report) Terence Jeffrey’s article, “Jeffrey on Socialism's Trajectory: Obama's HHS Is Bigger Than LBJ's Government,” is an interesting blend of the good, the bad and the ugly.  To be sure, the bad and the ugly are small, and the good is big.  His main point is that in the past increased spending on social welfare programs has dramatically increased the size of government and placed us on a socialist path to ruin and that Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (healthcare reform) pushes us further down that path.

The ugly is the overuse of the word “socialism.”  The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines socialism as

a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.

None of the programs he mentions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the prescription drug benefit, and now healthcare reform is a socialist program.  The government exercises control without owning the means of production.  Like socialism, the healthcare programs, as they have been designed and implemented, have weakened markets by limiting the role of prices. Socialism is only one road to serfdom. 

The bad is the exaggeration of the growth of government associated with the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 and the prescription drug benefit in 2003.  He introduces his ideas with an interesting fact he discovered while examining the historical tables published with Obama administration’s $3.7 trillion budget.  If the budget is passed as the administration proposes, the Department of Health and Human Services will spend $909.7 billion, more than the entire 1965 inflation adjusted budget of $822.6 billion.  The fact is a good literary tool because it catches the eye, but it also exaggerates the still impressive growth of government.  It exaggerates because America’s population and wealth have grown; we should expect a bigger budget.  Measuring the budget as a percentage of gross domestic product is a more meaningful measure. 

As Jeffrey noted, budget expenditures, which were 17.2% of GDP in 1965, grew to 25.3% of GDP in 2010.   Expenditures by Health and Human Services represented a miniscule .68% of GDP in 1965 to 6.25% in 2010.  The contribution of Health and Human Services expenditures to the total budget is similarly impressive.  Those expenditures were 6.24% of total budget expenditures in 1965 and grew to 24.7% in 2010.

The good was Jeffrey’s brief tour of important events leading to an expansion of the size of government.  In 1937, Roosevelt attempted to pack the Supreme Court with politically like-minded justices.  He failed to pack the Court, but he succeeded in intimidating it.  Social welfare programs deemed unconstitutional prior to the attempted Court packing were found constitutional thereafter. Medicare and Medicaid began in 1965 and government grew.  The prescription drug benefit was signed into law in 2003 and the government grew.  The new programs are at least correlated with an increase in the size of the federal government as a percentage of GDP and because they programs have grown rapidly, they are probably one of the causal factors of government’s growth. 

Wind Farms: Production Costs and Externalities

The pollution that results from the consumption of carbon based fuels is well known.  Less well known is the pollution produced by alternative sources of energy.  This post highlights pollution generated by wind farms.  The document I am quoting, “Why Wind Won't Work? - it's Weaker than Water.,” was produced by the Carbon Sense Coalition.  As the name implies, the group is doubtful of the value of alternative sources of energy.  They describe themselves as

…a voluntary group of people concerned about the extent to which carbon is wrongly vilified in Western societies, particularly in government, the media, and in business circles. We aim to restore balance and reason to the carbon debate, and to explain and defend the key role of carbon in production of most of our energy for heat, light, and transportation, and all of our food.

The scientific method involves methodical study and measurement and prudent researcher should examine sources and our own biases.  The article is not a scientific article but I believe that it makes valid points about problems associated with wind farms.  In part, the executive summary reads

Wind power is very dilute, and thus a large area of land is required to gather significant energy. Wind energy needs a wide network of roads, transmission lines and turbines which degrades any area containing wind farms. It has a huge land footprint.

The operating characteristics of turbine and generator mean that only a small part of wind energy can be captured.

Wind power is also intermittent, unreliable and hard to predict. Therefore large backup or storage systems are required. This adds to the capital and operating costs and increases the instability of the network.

Wind farms are uniformly hated by neighbours and will not be willingly accepted without heavy compensation payments. Their noise, flicker, fire risk and disturbing effect on domestic and wild animals are well documented.

The wind is free but wind power is far from it. Its cost is far above all conventional methods of generating electricity. Either taxpayers or consumers will pay this bill.

The third paragraph begins, “Wind power is also intermittent, unreliable and hard to predict.”  The article provides evidence from Texas and reported in the Daily Kos.

Wind turbines are prominent in Texas, but a cold snap in early 2008 caused power demand to soar and winds to drop. This sudden loss of wind power (from 1,700 MW to 300 MW) just as demand reached the evening peak caused the grid operator to declare a power emergency and start shedding load and  cutting power to customers. The operator cut supply by 1,100 MW within ten minutes.

Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/28/1303/48225/299/465497

The authors also comment on carbon emissions associated with wind.  Note that they do not say if wind generates more or les carbon emissions than a coal fired plant, but that wind produces a lot of carbon.

Superficial commentators think that because wind itself does not rely directly on carbon fuel, its introduction thus reduces carbon dioxide emissions. This is not necessarily so, and promoters should be required to prove their case. 

Firstly wind requires backup to maintain steady power generation when  wind power fails. The best backups are probably hydro power or gas power, both of which can be turned on and off as quickly as the wind changes. Coal and nuclear can provide backup, but it is very expensive to do it that way. Nuclear is forbidden in Australia and coal of course emits the dreaded carbon dioxide.

Secondly, wind farms are usually in remote locations and the turbines themselves are necessarily spread over a large area. Each turbine has 1,500 tonnes of concrete, 2 tonnes of rare earth metals, and lots of steel and copper and requires much heavy transport and earth moving equipment to construct the towers, the access roads and the transmission lines. They  also need maintenance over this large area. Every one of  these activities emits carbon dioxide.

Finally, the authors compare the cost per kilowatt hour of various energy sources.

Energy Source	USA Cents/Kwh
Natural Gas	8
Coal	9
Nuclear	11
Hydro-electric	12
Wind	14
Wind offshore	23
Solar thermal	26
Solar voltaic	40

Eventually, we will run out of oil and coal and these energy sources produce pollution even if you believe that these fuels contribute little to global warming or that the cost associated with global warming are relatively small.  My point is that other energy sources, particularly renewables, are expensive and dirty.  Rather than subsidize alternative sources of energy, the government should tax each according to the level of pollution they generate.  Setting the tax would be contentious but I would prefer this problem to rewarding government funding based in part of the political pull of recipients.

Bauman, the Stand-up Economist, Updated

(Edited 2/2/2011) Yoram Bauman, the stand-up economist, is a funny man and a good economist, and apparently, that is not an oxymoron.  Watch his new video for two reasons.  First, Bauman humorously explains Mankiw’s ten principles of economics, and second, he gives an example of an external cost and why markets cannot solve the problem.  The standard solutions are a tax on the good producing the pollutant or a cap-and-trade system.  He then pushes a carbon tax as a replacement to some part of the current tax system such as the corporate tax or the payroll tax. 

I am skeptical about some results that climate scientist reach.  Data may be corrupted by the urban heat island effect.  Proxies used to estimate past temperatures beyond fifty years do not seem to be statistically robust.  I also believe that the opportunity cost of alternative energy is well above the $.30 per gallon tax he seems to support, meaning that the cost of solving the problem is greater than the cost of the problem.  Finally, I doubt that unilateral action by the United States would significantly reduce global carbon emissions; it is a global emissions problem without a global enforcement mechanism.  With all my doubts, I still favor a carbon tax as a substitute to some other portion of our tax code.  It is a better, meaning less distorting tax.

Spontaneous vs. Government Order and Oil

In 1973, Arab oil producers cut production and began an embargo of the United States in response to the government’s decision to supply the Israeli military during the Yom Kippur War.  In the short run, neither demand nor supply are responsive to prices.  As Arab nations withheld oil, prices surged and in a misguided attempt to manage rising prices, the government instituted price controls that added fuel to the crisis and energized a government subsidized search for alternatives to oil.  

Wind, solar and ethanol have largely been failures and still heavily rely on subsidies.  Programs to encourage conservation have spent taxpayer dollars but were the expenditures necessary?  In the summer of 2008, did consumers need incentives from Uncle Sam to conserve gas?

The spontaneous interactions of consumers and producers has mitigated the problem.  High prices encouraged oil exploration.  New sources oil were found.  Deep water drilling and other technologies were developed.

This is but one chapter in a long story of the battle between scarcity and market led innovation in oil production.  Jonathan Fahey reports in “New drilling method opens vast oil fields in US” that a new and non subsidized drilling technology first developed for extracting natural gas but now applied to oil has the potential to greatly expand U.S. production.

Companies are investing billions of dollars to get at oil deposits scattered across North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and California. By 2015, oil executives and analysts say, the new fields could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day — more than the entire Gulf of Mexico produces now.

This new drilling is expected to raise U.S. production by at least 20 percent over the next five years. And within 10 years, it could help reduce oil imports by more than half, advancing a goal that has long eluded policymakers.

As with other market developed technologies, it is cost effective.

…drilling for shale oil is not dependent on high oil prices. Papa [chief executive of EOG Resources, the company that first used horizontal drilling to tap shale oil] says this oil is cheaper to tap than the oil in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or in Canada's oil sands.

Problems remain.  Oil is still a finite resource and like all energy sources, it pollutes.  If environmental critics are right, and burning oil results in global warming by releasing carbon into the atmosphere and warming is costly, then developing relatively cheap new sources of oil is a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless.  Other things equal, I would rather struggle with carbon emission with relatively cheap oil prices.

Sessions Wrong on Trade

Since Adam Smith wrote the An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations economists have supported removing restrictions on trade.  Alston, Kearl and Vaughn reported the results of a survey of economists in “Is There Consensus among Economists in the 1990’s?” which was published in the American Economic Review.  Of those responding to the survey, 93% agreed with the statement that “tariffs and import quotas usually reduce general economic welfare.”

I am assuming that Jeff Sessions is a smart man and understands the economics of trade as well as the calculus of governing. In an ugly example of relationship capitalism, he has apparently concluded that it is more important to make constituents happy than it is to do what is best for the American economy.  The Wall Street Journal reports in “Fair Trade for One” that in December, Sessions “put a hold on the renewal of GSP [Generalized System of Preferences] on behalf of Exxel Outdoors, which makes sleeping bags in his state.”   The General System of Preferences was a program that has been in place since the 1970s that aided poor countries by lowering our tariffs on their products.  This was not only beneficial to poor countries but to consumers and the economy as a whole.  The program had a review process conducted by a subcommittee in the House and Exxel Outdoors had appealed to the subcommittee and lost.  They made a second appeal but Sessions intervened before the second decision.

Bangladesh is the economic powerhouse that Sessions claims is pushing its way into U.S. markets by unfairly subsidizing its products.  Their sleeping bag sales rose to 8.4% of U.S. imports due to manufactures moving production from China to escape “high cost” labor.  Bangladesh has a per capita GDP of $1,500, about the same as Haiti.  Perhaps Bangladesh has a comparative advantage in the production of products manufactured with low skilled labor.