There are oil reserves but they are stored as crude oil, and the Federal government has released some of this for domestic production. The refineries that turn this into gasoline and diesel fuel have been running at the ragged edge of their production limits for some time now though and Katrina whacked several of them, knocking out a signifiant percentage of the nation's refinery capacity. Even after the damaged plants are brought back on-line there is still the problem of shipping the refined fuel away from the Gulf to the rest of the USA -- several pipelines were also hit.

 Just-In-Time became a mantra for efficient business in the 80s and 90s, with little or no buffer stocks of expensive material stored in expensive warehouses, relying on daily deliveries from suppliers orchestrated by computers and telecommunications links. JIT breaks bad when there is a disruption in the supply chain though and something like Katrina is bound to cause knock-on effects as other supply chains dependent on gasoline get hit in a cascade.

Stephen:

Actually, one can't keep petrol reserves--it has a lot of volatile components and will break down in only a couple months. Diesel is much more stable, which is why it's the main choice for military vehicles. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was intended to prevent complete collapse in case the USSR got miffed and nuked Yanbu, or if OPEC got in a snit and turned off the tap. Running our oil supply chain at its maximum capacity is a relatively recent phenomenon, due to zero effort to increase fuel economy, a growing population, and low fuel prices that encouraged sprawl and SUVs. So nobody made an effort to reinforce that particular weak link, and there's no quick way to do much about it. The US is simply going to have to use 10% less fuel for at least a month, and likely more.

Dave:

If al-Qaidi decides to blow up anything in Saudi Arabia, it will be intended to hurt the Saudi royalty, not us. It's hard to imagine what else the US could do to boost bin Laden's standing without getting into B-movie villian territory, so why bother provoking us? Better to save the sleepers for when the US seriously considers abandoning their #1 jihadist recruitment effort, aka Iraq.

Charlie

Oil price hike? You ain't seen nuthin yet. Me? I'm an old man. I remember the first two price hikes, caused by OPEC (remember them?) We wiseguys in the West got our own back by lending all those Middle East petrodollars to Third World countries in the form of loans they would never be able to pay back and then took it back from them in terms of grandiose building schemes they didn't need and couldn't build - but we could - or in the form of armaments they needed to fight the surrogate wars we fomented.

Fuck you very kindly, Sheikh Yamani.

Plus ca change, mais c'est la meme chose.

Once again, whatever we may think of Gee Whizz or any of our leaders, elected or otherwise, those are real people dying on the Gulf Coast and the questions our American friends MUST ask themselves is whether any died because the organisation wasn't up to delivering the aid (and could the evacuation been done more thoroughly - just 'cos you're poor doesn't seem like a good enough reason to drown) and, if so, what are they going to do to make sure it doesn't go down that way the next time - because their will be a next time.

I'm old enough to remember Ronald Reagan canceling virtually all the alternate energy R & D projects the DoE and other agencies had started working on under Carter following the 70s oil shocks. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydrogen cars, hydrogen storage, fuel cells and several others. All long-term, online in 10-20 years stuff that would also have helped the greenhouse problem that was then just starting to be talked about. No need to waste government money on that nonsense now that oil was cheap again and major corporations needed tax relief. I remember thinking "Oh dear, we're probably going to live to regret this..."

Edited by author 09-02-2005 11:19 PM
The government seems to worship scarcity. “Well we had to truck food in on wheel and cart and most of the men were pregnant and such.” An obsession with timing. In 1812 they would have been ready with some food and a decent backup guard from Texas knowing the hurricane was coming a week in advance direct toward the city. They would have seen it by boat. There were only the New Orleans police out there for 4 days and they couldn't police the city because they were saving people.

It's weird but this reminds me of the overly Historical Sci-Fi being written today. Like an off balance time warp.
These usually means a large inefficiency somewhere.

An example of our ability today to manage scarcity that isn't being done in the U.S.
http://www.capp.ca/default.asp?V_DOC_ID=688

In Accelerando it says the closer we got to the Singularity the more government control came to be until society was too open to manage.
The more the central-government tries to manage and hide information the more irrelevant it becomes. Gladly Accelerando stayed relevant for me by shaking it up. As a side, Linux is moduler based also.

Bush made some wild statements about Fuel Cells at the election. What??? I dunno
Clinton made some weird statements about nanotech in the early 90's Huh???

Maybe we should just let scientists run the country like we are finally doing with NASA. Is this a sign?

A probable OSI/Linux type solution.

Open merit-based government:
http://www.freestateproject.org/

Libertarians are the leaders here, as they are strong moderators, but are not the exception to the rule. No single political style rules all

"The [USA] government seems to worship scarcity." Only for those below the megabuck per family class. Above that (i.e. starting at the upper part of the Professional class of doctors, engineers, lawyers, et al.) the USA government is engaged in wholesale plundering of the assets of this and the next generation of the majority.

My wife, a dual British-Australian citizen, says that in any civilized country, the massive failure of the Bush administration would bring down the government.

It is not so simple. Emperor Bush II, after all, came into office by a coup, and consolidated power 4 years later (involving election machine software as well as more traditional fraud). In the process, he betrayed (1) the Bush family (firing the remnants of his Dad's friends from Cabinet-level and the next rung down), and recall that Bush Senior fought to SAVE the wetlands around New Orleans; (2) the rump-state of the Republican party (which had been nominally run by the technocrat Goldwater, whose election failure led to the takeover by the anti-government Reagan wing, which in turn was displaced by the current anti-Science Imperial Theocrats; (3) the country (as reconfirmed by the Gulf Coast fiasco); (4) the World (unilateralism, Iraq, Bolton in UN, etc.); (5) the universe (see Anti-Science, supra), where putting an actual scientist in charge of NASA may be too little, too late, as the current NASA Administrator (whom I admire) is still married to the Shuttle/Space Station welfare system.

It makes me physically sick to see, on TV, Emperor Bush II put his arm around Michael Brown (fired for Gross Incompetence from his previous job), call him "Brownie," and praise FEMA action in one paragraph, while calling it "unacceptable" in the next.

Message to terrorists: hit a major US city with impunity. Homeland Security cannot do their minimum job even in a city where contingency plans have been effect for years, and RPGd in detail recently (the "Hurricane Pam" exercise in New Orleans).

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but the gurgle of a child drowning in an flooded attic.

Edited by author 09-03-2005 04:36 PM
The Free State Project has its roots in Federalism:

This would probably be more of a basis for it:

The Federalism Project:
http://federalismproject.org/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/federalism/

Limiting the role of central government and creating more competition between states hence no more emperor Bush (Slick Bushy) or Clinton for that matter/Kerry/Dean/Grandma etc... It doesn't matter. Any clown can come along and start ordering people around but if you create open competition (Like Linux distros) then it wont happen.

We need to rethink our country and do it quick and I will get very involved.

Also America is not the only culprit.

Shoot'em and let the gators have them. They are taking shit from people who desperately need it.

Er, there's a possibility that they also desperately need it. As someone mentioned on other blogs, if I had a kid whimpering from thirst, I'd also be robbing nursing homes and cop cars.

Maybe we should just let scientists run the country like we are finally doing with NASA.

Science is far from in first plac at NASA. If it were then they wouldn't have to follow Bush's Moon/Mars project and could do something more sensible instead.

MSNBC has a video today of a city official saying that a great deal of NOLA housing in the Orleans Parish flood zone will probably be razed and new structures built. My earlier post re: gentrification and the future absence of low income housing for people of color seems to be bearing out. Some of those homes were owner inhabited. Most were owned by absentee landlords who were white , black and every shade in between. The land those ruined houses sit on is now ever so much more valuable than it ever was before. The greater part of the population of the people of color that left NOLA will never again walk the banquette of their old home street. Some see it as fortuitous urban renewal. A great deal of wealth will result from that misery.

"New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize"
    By George Friedman
    STRATFOR
Thursday 01 September 2005

"... During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans...."

Scientists at NASA? Mostly engineers, technicians, and managers at NASA, enabling scientists as Principal Investigators to figure out what spaceraft instrument data means. Well, hats off to Professor A'Hearn et al., the scientists who captured the amazing results of the Deep Impact mission. Comet nuclei have the methyl cyanide so useful in initiating life on Earth! And, somewhere between the stars, larger comet nuclei might be hot enough to evolve their own life, as the late Sir Fred Hoyle suggested.

JVP:
>Scientists at NASA? Mostly engineers, technicians, and >managers at NASA, enabling scientists as Principal >Investigators to figure out what spaceraft instrument data >means. Well, hats off to Professor A'Hearn et al., the >scientists who captured the amazing results of the Deep >Impact mission.

Nice to hear something nice about NASA. I may not be perfect, but I think the whole bashing is somewhat
unfair. Just think about the number of successful
NASA-missions (or with NASA involvment) are going on
at the moment - Deep Impact, two Mars-rovers (how many orbiters at the moment ?), Cassini, Stardust, and two (!)
space telescopes, Hubble and Spitzer (I probably even forgot some). Each of these mission already had at least significant impact on astronomy or planetary sciences.
Remember the times when there was maybe one such mission
all few years ?

Andreas

Guys -- what does NASA have to do with the geopolitical aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

The state of NASA is either Bush or Clinton's fault too, depending on who you ask?

(What, take the piss out of US political discourse? Me?)

Each day makes this situation at once more ghastly and farcical - Bush may have been asleep at the wheel but Murphy was evidently wide awake, 'cos it seems as though whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.

Something that is really concerning me, however, is the seeming determination of many to stay on in a plague zone. What sort of country is it - what sort of opinion of their neighbours do people have - when they think cholera is a preferred option? And it is cholera we are talking about, not the user friendly, not very serious, maybe the runs at worst e-coli outbreak that the media decided to call it. Insured or not, if someone steals something you are still alive. If you get cholera you will be dead, horribly (unless anyone believes the authorities will be able to cope with that better than everything else, and they are batting zero for a hell of a lot)

The sight of the Emperor Bush declaring he would hold an enquiry would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic. He genuinely has no idea that he is (part of) the problem, and his mouthings remind me of Jonathan Aitkin marching into his perjury trial, confident he would win because whatever he - the Knave of Hearts - said had to be true because he - the Knave of Hearts - said it. Like I say, it would be laughable if it wasn't pathetic and we weren't seeing real people suffer and look like continuing to suffer for a long time to come.

Question. How did the media of the world get into New Orleans before the relief effort, and where did they get their food, power and water in a city where there were none of the above?

As for NASA, Charlie - just think of this word. Scapegoat. The fact that they were probably the only Federally funded quango to have nothing whatsoever to do with the failure just makes them more suitable to carry the can. After all, they're scientists and engineers, and everyone knows the guy in the white coat is ALWAYS to blame.