The Slow Mo Blog Roll Makeover

As many of you know, our blog roll has needing culling for many a moon. The Baron hasn’t been able to fit that task into his already overburdened schedule, and I can’t sit here long enough to begin, much less finish such a long task. Doing it piece-meal made a shamble of my good intentions.

But to the rescue came a very nice fellow, the admin for OilPrice.com. Like many others, he asked if we’d be willing to add his blog’s name to the list. I explained the problem of our deadwood and the Baron’s rule of no-new-additions-until-a-time-of substantial-subtractions…

When I told Mr. Stafford about the situation, he volunteered to do the necessary house-cleaning on the sidebar. Remarkable offer! He was saying he’d clean up the whole enchilada. Amazing.

For a normal person, this probably isn’t a difficult job, just tedious. And if Mr. Stafford had been dealing with a normal person, his work would’ve been up on our side bar late last year. However, I am an Obstacle in the Universe so the changes have been sitting in the Baron’s hands while he waits for me to do this post. He won’t do any large changes without informing readers about them.

I’ve long forgotten how many blogs are in that whole listing, but I do know many have been out of business for a long time. Eventually, marshalling the remnants of my mind, I had the Baron tell me again what Mr. Stafford needed to do to create a list of dead blogs in a format Da B could use on our template. Then I passed this protocol from the Baron onto our heaven-sent volunteer. In short order he returned the completed spread sheet. In fact, it was a remarkable turn-around time when you consider that he and his assistant had to visit each URL and make a judgment as to whether it was still viable. If I remember correctly, our definition of a closed blog was one that hadn’t been updated in the previous nine months or so.

So back came the completed spreadsheet — about ninety out-of-date websites in all, plus new URLs for old websites that had migrated to new addresses. And then…and then, the Baron and Mr. Stafford have waited patiently for this post to be written. The same way our donors are kept waiting for their acknowledgements to arrive.

Please, as a favor to our donor for his time and energy, visit Oil Price. A separate page has a free sign-up for a Market Intelligence Report. Go to the page to sign up for breaking information on energy news. Free information, and it’s interesting. I know, because we get it in our email.

In the period I’ve been reading the Oil Price site, they’ve changed the ‘skin’ quite a bit. The new version is visually pleasing, and sections are divided clearly. I clicked on one main story, “The Reasons for High Oil Prices“, to find an author I hadn’t noticed before. Her essay contains information I’d not seen before. In addition to the usual reasons for high costs (like Iran’s perturbations) the author says something rather stunning (the emphasis is mine):

Between 1983 and 2005, world oil supply rose by 1.64% per year. If world oil supply had continued to rise at that rate, oil production would have been about 5 million barrels a day higher in 2011 than it actually was. The fact that oil production has remained relatively flat since 2005 is the primary reason oil prices have continued to rise, except during the 2008-2009 recession. (This recession was to a significant extent caused by high oil prices…)

The amount of the oil shortfall is huge. It is far more than the amount of oil taken off-line by Libya, and more than Saudi Arabia’s supposed spare production capacity. Given the high price of oil, most of the missing oil seems to be oil that we do not have production capacity for.

Did you know that? I didn’t. But I do know why our production capacity sucks. Because of Obama’s refusals here and efforts of the greenies at a global level. It goes back well before Obama, this scandal of the ageing infrastructure of oil refineries. But he has made it worse by demonizing the producers. He saves his tax breaks for businesses he likes. Oil and coal don’t make his list.

In looking at the list of previous essays at the bottom of her post, I found this one, explaining the absolute necessity for the future of an abundant supply of cheap oil. That declaration would seem to be a no-brainer, but we have a president who has other ideas. He thinks we should use a substitute for oil….we should burn algae.

Yes, algae.

Here’s what he says in a recent, more-surreal-than-usual-speech:



Charles Krauthammer did a slam-bam sarcastic response to this idea:



Of course the (not so) secret reason behind this insanity is money: think of all the research and development funding Obama can hand out to his greenie supporters in return for campaign infusions. And this back-scratching isn’t even illegal. Tacky and ethically challenged, perhaps, but no one can prove anything.

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I don’t cover our presidential news much. It’s too demoralizing to watch this man proclaim bizarre, trivial solutions to serious problems. Besides, others have better contacts and excel at the game.

I wish them well; I couldn’t do it and stay sane.

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Don’t forget James Stafford’s energy website, Oil Price. com. I remain in his debt for taking on a task I couldn’t possibly have done.