The Eye Between the Storms
by Michael Vickerman, RENEW Wisconsin
Petroleum and Natural Gas Watch, Vol. 4, Number 1
September 21, 2005
On its way toward the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi, Hurricane Katrina cut a swath through a hydrocarbon-rich zone of the Gulf of Mexico, the largest domestic source of petroleum and natural gas. When fully operational, this offshore oil and natural gas complex accounts for about 30% of domestic oil supplies and 20% of domestic natural gas supplies.
Fueled by exceptionally warm waters, this Category 4 storm KO’ed nearly 50 production platforms and four drilling rigs. Extensive damage was reported at 20 platforms and nine drillings rigs. The force of the winds and the waves tore six rigs loose from their moorings and sent them adrift; one rig in Plaquemines Parish was found beached on Alabama’s Dauphin Island. At the storm’s peak, on August 29, more than 90% of the Gulf’s oil extraction capacity and nearly 90% of its natural gas extraction capacity was off-line.
Daily Archives: September 22, 2005
Our Tax Dollars At Work for Hollywood: Anti-Copying Attaches
Commerce is making ready a team of intellectual property (IP) specialists to deploy to nations giving us fits on piracy. Sort of a WTO-enforcing SWAT team.
The lead experience here is China, and that is all fine and good. This is where our “conflict” with China should really be centered: in economics and in rules.
Other countries targeted are all either New Core (Russia, India, Brazil) like China, or key Seam States (Thailand) or places where we’re making a special trade effort to shrink the Gap (Big Bang-land Middle East).
Good move, I say. One the White House can point to in upcoming trade pact battled with Congress, which, in its infinite wisdom, is moving more and more toward protections as a catch-all answer for America’s economic woes. Bad, stupid, ahistorical choice, but there it is.
Regulation Destroys Competition
At the August 5, 2005 meeting of the FCC, following the Supreme Court’s decision that cable modem connectivity is an information service, the FCC leveled (lowered) the playing field by declaring that DSL, too, is an information service. These decisions remove the common carrier obligation of the line owner to share — non-carrier ISPs like Earthlink are left to twist slowly in the wind. The industry is, for all intents, re-verticalized.
The central idea of the Telecom Act of 1996 — that competition would replace regulation — is all but dead. Regulation has systematically fought competition since 1996. Regulation has won.
More worth reading on blocking useful network apps here.
Pew Internet: Technology & Media Use
The report argues that, while broadband adoption has grown quickly in recent years, there are reasons to believe that it is slowing. The report develops a model of broadband adoption that hypothesizes that the intensity of online use is the critical variable in understanding the home high-speed adoption decision and the trajectory of the adoption curve. Using national survey data from 2002 and 2005, the paper shows that the role of online experience in explaining intensity of internet use has vanished over this time frame; the explanatory effect of having a broadband connection has grown. This suggests that relative to 2002 there is not much pent-up demand for high-speed internet use at home.
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