COTD: Why The God King Wants The Coal Mines Closed

Conventional Wisdom, Unconventional Oil | Watts Up With That?: "The Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process has been capable of producing synthetic crude oil (i.e. syncrude) from coal at competitive cost (n.b. cost and not price) with crude oil since 1994.

We proved the technical and economic abilities of the LSE process with a demonstration plant at Point Of Ayr in North Wales."

RTWC (read the whole comment). This comment is a great example of addressing the weakest part of Willis' post (about the politicization of oil industry terminology) which is the failure to explicitly take on the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) argument for "peak oil".

This recalls the "genius central planners" from over a hundred years ago who predicted "peak horse sh*t" in our largest cities if things went on the way they were. Needless to say they were too dimwitted to predict the rise of the auto and Henry Ford (among others). No doubt if they had the power and level of vision back then that our current God King has today we would today instead be riding around on horses with corks up their *sses. \sarc

The simple fact is that the deep "R" part of technology R&D cannot be planned -- and the "D" part can sometimes be nearly as bad to predict depending on the quality of management which all to often leads to an overly politicized game of "schedule chicken". And that's all among people who are reasonably technical.

Add actual bozo politicians to the mix like our current God King who publicly admits that he struggles with the 7th grade math competence level where orders of magnitude are taught and you wonder why we have the following household budget (scaled from what laughingly passes as a FedGov budget for your improved understanding)?:

"Why the U.S. was downgraded:
• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let's now remove 8 zeros and pretend it's your household budget:
• Annual family income: $21,700
• Money the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
• Total budget cuts: $385"

Actually, this is now somewhat dated -- it's worse now. And that's using FedGov's own numbers which are completely fraudulent when held up to the accounting standards that private corporations -- except the banking oligarchs of course -- must meet.

Unfortunately, "peak horse sh*t" by the politicians and central planners seems to have continued unabated to this day...