“The markets will treat it like it’s Tyrannosaurus rex, but bigger,” said David Pursell, an energy analyst with Houston’s Pickering Energy Partners.
Likely signaling what’s ahead, Sunday night, when electronic trading resumed on the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil futures spiked $4.50 per barrel, putting the cost above $70 for the first time since oil began trading there in 1983.
houston chronicle
If Katrina remains a Cat 5 storm and hits New Orleans it will have the effect of knocking out not only the oil and gas production from the Gulf of Mexico but also a good deal of the infrastructure which supports that production.
The upshot will be a steep rise in prices for oil and natural gas. $100.00 a barrel is not out of the question if production is knocked out long term.
Written by jay on August 29th, 2005 with 3 comments.
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So far today, I’ve looked at Global Warming and Katrina and the crisis resulting from Lousiana’s National Guard being in Iraq instead of defending their state.
Will Bush stay on vacation? At this point, it doesn’t really matter. Because Bush has been asleep at the wheel for four years.
swing state project
Classy.
Written by jay on August 29th, 2005 with no comments.
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Could be the perfect storm. The satelite picture basically shows the whole of the Gulf covered in cloud. The fastest way to keep updated is, surprise, Instapundit. Looks like Glenn is updating here.
MSM will have pictures and storm tracks and the like; bloggers will have this
I am in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and we are battening down the hatches here, too. My parents and in-laws, both living in New Orleans, left yesterday for parts north and west. As a child, I survived both Betsy and Camille, many more since then. This one scares me.
Clifford Grout writing to instapundit
Here is hoping Katrina stalls or swerves. But if she doesn’t blogs are going to have a lot more of the story than will fit MSM.
Update: From Suspect Devices:
Last year, I was worked a hurricane planning workshop in Baton Rouge, put on by the state’s Department of Homeland Security. It dealt with planning and response to a major SE Louisiana hurricane, complete with simulations and expert-designed projections, surveys, etc. A Cat3 making a direct hit on NOLA was projected to cause massive damage, far beyond what the average person might think. Consider the possibility of 18 feet of water in the CBD, a toxic soup of household and industrial chemicals floating around the flooded bowl that NOLA sits in and substantial, if not complete, destruction of homes and businesses along the river. Think floating corpses and balls of fire ants and gasoline and god knows what. If you stay and survive, search and rescue will not come after your ass for some time, and if they do they will be coming to take you out and nothing else. After they blow the levee and the water goes down, it’ll still be months before the city is livable. Casualties possibly in five figures.
That’s a Cat3. If Katrina makes landfall as a Cat5? The destruction will be apocalyptic.
Get out now.
suspect device
Yup.
Written by jay on August 29th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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The Canadian Bullet has been running for nearly a month now. Still lots of minor tweaks to do. Still some feeds which are rendering the full text of people’s posts rather than the exerpts I am aiming for. And still the annoying Firefox flicker. But as a proof of concept these last few weeks have done their job.
A couple of interesting things: first, Canadians as compared to our American friends at The American Bullet or The American Scattergun are less prolific and far more civil. Busy Canadian bloggers are lucky if they make three posts a day. The single autho blogs at the American Bullet often hit double digits and that is not really counting Glenn Reynolds.
The level of civility is encouraging. While many Canadians will take shots at blogs on the left or the right, (or at fellow righties), the shots are seldom personal. The idea of a conversation has not been lost.
Most of all, most of the Canadian blogs are written with substantial agreement as to the underlying nature of reality. This cannot be said of the American blogs as reading Captains’ Quarters and Kos would suggest there really are alternate universes.
The underlying premise of The Canadian Bullet is that it is important for Canadians to be able to access blogs with which they do not agree. Andrew over at CanConv has adopted much the same tactic with well written pieces on various sides of various debates being run together. By aggregating, what we are trying to do is provide food for thought but also the bridges so that, in Canada at least, the divide between right/center/left and plain “out there” can be spanned.
At a practical level, one thing I find with the Bullet is that I am much more inclined to pop over and comment on a particular post than I was without it. (A mixed blessing to be sure.) (this would work even better if my code consistently provided the right links….I’m working on it.)
The other effect of aggregation is that what people write finds audiences which might never have run across their material. When I hit publish here this piece will go to my blog, The Canadian Bullet and to James Bow’s Non-Partisan Canadians. As more people begin to read aggregators the knock on effects will be significant.
Some years ago I wrote that what the Canadian blogosphere was lacking was a “linker” on the order of Instapundit. We still are. But the miracle of RSS feeds and a little bit of poking around with Wordpress has made a robot which mimics some of the aspects of a linker.
I’m hoping this will be out of beta by the Labour day weekend at which point I will send around groovy Bullet buttons to festoon your blogs with.
Written by jay on August 29th, 2005 with 2 comments.
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