Economy of Ivory Coast:

The Ivorian economy is largely market based and depends heavily on the agricultural sector. Almost 70% of the Ivorian people are engaged in some form of agricultural activity. Côte d'Ivoire is among the world's largest producers and exporters of coffee, cocoa beans, and palm oil.

This is serious. A chocolate shock could shake our slowly recovering economy, and it makes me shudder to think of how this could impact Starbuck's. *shudder*

Now before someone mentions it: Yes, Ivory Coast produces oil. But they are #59 in oil production volume, producing about 60,000 barrels a day. (Libya produces over 25 times that volume.) Hell, even Italy, Trinidad and Tobago, and East Timor produce more oil than Ivory Coast. So oil is a negligible factor in the equation, thus making Ivory Coast itself a negligible factor.

Ivory Coast has over 20 million people. (Libya, by comparison, has roughly 6.5 million people.) Its civil war has been going off and on for almost 9 years. Thousands and thousands of people have died; millions have become refugees. It was hoped that the 2010 presidential election would bring peace to their country, but obviously it has not. This isn't a new problem; it's been going on for years. Yet silence. Yet no intervention.

But on the first day of NATO operations in Libya, the US fired 118 Tomahawk missiles. (Britain, for its part, fired 6.) You want intervention? You got it, motherfucker.

Fuck this.

>> ^NetRunner:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/GeeSussFreeK" title="member since August 1st, 2008" class="profilelink">GeeSussFreeK you want to make an argument to go along with your factoid? Are you saying Libyan oil production doesn't affect oil prices?
Believe me, this is one I want to be wrong about. I wish I believed it was all about noble notions. Maybe for a lot of the people out there calling for intervention, it is. But I don't buy it. I'm willing to believe it's a confluence of oil, nobody liking Gaddafi, and the fact that he's murdering civilians. But we don't like lots of people, and to be frank, lots of dictators murder civilians. Yet Libya is where we're drawing a line in the sand, and quickly too.


O ya, don't throw me in the support camp by any means. Just pointing out that we aren't in a "real" threat of oil not being at the gas station any time soon or something. You are attesting to a thing that is hard to know, but most likely some truth. It's why things like wikileaks are nice, get to see the REAL reasons behind political actions. This all seems like a boondoggle in the making.

@GeeSussFreeK you want to make an argument to go along with your factoid? Are you saying Libyan oil production doesn't affect oil prices?

Believe me, this is one I want to be wrong about. I wish I believed it was all about noble notions. Maybe for a lot of the people out there calling for intervention, it is. But I don't buy it. I'm willing to believe it's a confluence of oil, nobody liking Gaddafi, and the fact that he's murdering civilians. But we don't like lots of people, and to be frank, lots of dictators murder civilians. Yet Libya is where we're drawing a line in the sand, and quickly too.

1. I can just tell by look at the digging, if they went a few more inches down, there would be lots of oil all over the place. I wish they would say, Yeap, there is tons of oil under the sand, its a mess don't go digging in it.

2. I LOLed at the dude who said "Are you looking for Oil product?" Who the F says " Oil product. "

errrrr,mmmmmm. Sir are you looking for Oil product? What a geek-neck.

@GeeSussFreeK

Yes, I understand it's a difficult subject for the layman...hell, I'M a layman when it comes to climate science, but I know how to learn and sift through information to determine what's bullshit. I do my own learning and I don't rely on hearsay. A subject being difficult doesn't excuse terrible logic and belief in misinformation.

How can you remain "cautiously agnostic" after statements like the following? Massive conspiracy of scientists?

"The finding that the climate has warmed in recent decades and that human activities are already contributing adversely to global climate change has been endorsed by every national science academy that has issued a statement on climate change, including the science academies of all of the major industrialized countries. With the release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007, no remaining scientific society is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change."


Even the petroleum geologists finally acknowledged it...y'know, the guys who work for the oil industry...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_of_Petroleum_Geologists#Global_warming_controversy

Just because some ozone depleting chemicals have a greenhouse effect doesn't mean that the ozone hole getting better means there can't be global warming. It's that whole if A implies B then B implies A logic people incorrectly use all the time. Also, the ozone hole over the Antarctic is expected to continue for decades, even if it is "getting better". AND, there is an expectation that as the ozone hole in the Antarctic gets better, it will actually increase the speed of warming in that area:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/science/earth/26ozone.html

The point is, "it's complicated" should lead one to "man, I'd better find out what the deal is" not, "man, I'll never understand that so I'm gonna wait for someone else to tell me what the deal is." Nor should it lead people to take small bits of evidence that logically connect to a positive outcome and then assume the outcome for the entire situation will be positive. That's exactly what the problem is with "ozone repair => no global warming" logic.

Ozone-depleting chemicals are constantly being phased out of use where possible (some are used as fire suppressants and are therefore bottled up most of the time, etc). The general public recognizes ozone-depleting chemicals as bad, and there's no political problem with discontinuing them.

On the other hand, there's a political problem with discontinuing the use of oil, so we see lots of misinformation related to climate change. Millions if not billions of people have a direct stake in oil production, refining, distribution, and consumption. That should probably lead you to believe all the controversy is generated as opposed to existing on its own as a result of collected empirical data.

Even if we stop all domestic oil use, there's still a huge economic incentive to produce more oil and sell it on the world market. Increased tax revenue is hard to give up for those who care about budget deficits.

Of course there's the environmental side too. We may be able to prevent future spills, but using oil products for fuel still produces greenhouse gases whether it's burned by us or someone else.

>> ^quantumushroom:

Here's what we do know.
Obamarx is an enemy of capitalism, and Americanism
His policies are failures, as were FDR's

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work ... After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot! --Henry Morgenthau, Treasury Secretary under FDR, after 2 terms of FDR's "New Deal".
The environ-mental-cases hate oil
Obamarx is conveniently off the hook for suggesting drilling
His illegitimate regime now has an excuse--at least to themselves--to further regulate oil production, just like they've attempted to take over Wall Street, the auto industry and health care
Whether the left admits it or not, we're at war with radical muslim vermin, iran and north korea
Obamarx (wisely?) has sent stormtroopers to the oil rigs
The real sabotage is coming from the White House every day. Compared to the disasters foisted on the USA by taxocrats, a mere oil spill is a few drops from a leaking ballpoint pen.


OK...

So when FDR put "The New Deal" into effect, employment was around 37% and immediately started dropping.

http://blog.heritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ndchart.JPG

When Morganthau said that during FDR's second term, unemployment was at 25% and STILL DROPPING. It was still going down, not up, when we entered the war and started employing everyone.

How is that a failure?

Again, you just ignored the facts that I presented to you.


>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^rougy:
Okay, by the numbers:
"As of 1992, Canada had accumulated over 200 million tonnes of low-level radioactive tailings from uranium mining, over one million cubic metres of contaminated soil and 900,000 bundles of nuclear fuel wastes.
The dilemma about how to properly dispose of nuclear waste continues to plague Canada’s nuclear industry."
(source)
"The results prove that Canada has one of the poorest environmental records of the industrialized countries. The primary finding is that for the twenty-five environmental indicators examined, Canada's overall ranking among OECD nations is a dismal 28th out of 29."
(source)
This would seem to contradict much of what you claimed above. No?

No, it doesn't. It just demonstrates your selective ignorance.
The overwhelming majority of Canada's uranium mining was all for weapons production, only a very small fraction was actually for civilian power generation. The heavy metals used in solar panels don't grow on trees either, back to the mines!
Canada's environmental record is almost exclusively based on oil production, what Canada's environment needs is MORE reliance on uranium, not less.

>> ^rougy:

Okay, by the numbers:
"As of 1992, Canada had accumulated over 200 million tonnes of low-level radioactive tailings from uranium mining, over one million cubic metres of contaminated soil and 900,000 bundles of nuclear fuel wastes.
The dilemma about how to properly dispose of nuclear waste continues to plague Canada’s nuclear industry."
(source)
"The results prove that Canada has one of the poorest environmental records of the industrialized countries. The primary finding is that for the twenty-five environmental indicators examined, Canada's overall ranking among OECD nations is a dismal 28th out of 29."
(source)
This would seem to contradict much of what you claimed above. No?


No, it doesn't. It just demonstrates your selective ignorance.

The overwhelming majority of Canada's uranium mining was all for weapons production, only a very small fraction was actually for civilian power generation. The heavy metals used in solar panels don't grow on trees either, back to the mines!

Canada's environmental record is almost exclusively based on oil production, what Canada's environment needs is MORE reliance on uranium, not less.

^

Make no mistake that ANY power source that reaches a decent percentage of global production will be dominantly controlled by only a select few massive corporations, nuclear and oil are by no means special in that regard.

As long as producing solar panels requires large factories to produce them in any quantity the control of that production will be no different from control over oil production today.

>> ^blankfist:

Do you mind citing?


I did some figurin' using ANWR's numbers, back when the Right was making a big stink about it, since it's the favorite one to get trotted out. At peak output (which it wouldn't reach for more than a decade if we opened it now), it would account for less than a million barrels a day -- ~0.5 to 1.0% of total global oil production (which is ~85 million barrels a day) and <5% of (current) US oil consumption (~20 million barrels a day).

If it were possible to exhume all of ANWR's estimated oil (7 billion barrels) in one go, it would last the United States one year.

So that's just ANWR--but what about all of the other off-limits places? Here's the EIA's report. In short: If the outer continental shelf were opened now, nothing much would change through 2030. There's an estimated (undiscovered) total of 50 billion barrels of oil that are currently off limits to drilling. Total US production would be 1.6% higher than the reference (no OCS drilling) projection for 2017-2030, and 3% in 2030. Finally,

Although a significant volume of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and natural gas resources is added in the OCS access case, conversion of those resources to production would require both time and money. In addition, the average field size in the Pacific and Atlantic regions tends to be smaller than the average in the Gulf of Mexico, implying that a significant portion of the additional resource would not be economically attractive to develop at the reference case prices.

More numbers: In 2008 the entire world produced ~26 billion barrels of oil and the US produced about 1.8 billion--which will stay essentially flat through 2030 even if we opened ANWR and the OCS to drilling.

The US's total proven oil reserves are about 21 billion barrels--maybe a total of ~120 if you go with estimated undiscovered oil--compared to 1200 billion (proven) for the entire world.

Sorry for some inconsistent numbers: Figures are from 2007, 2008, and 2009, so there are some inconsistencies there. I think I properly kept barrels per day lumped together and barrels per year lumped together.

But anyway: The US has a total of less than two percent of the world's proven oil reserves. We currently produce around 5-6% of oil. Oil is a commodity and gets sold on the world market; more than a fifth of US oil is exported even while we're using 4x as much as we produce. Opening protected areas to drilling would have a marginal impact on total US oil production and an even more marginal impact on world oil production.

Oil reserves.
ANWR oil reserves. Sorry for Wikipedia links--you can follow their citations.

Edit: I used this page too.

Direpickle has a point. There are 2 issues here, price of oil and oil products and self-sufficiency. In 2006 the US produced 8 million barrels a day while consuming 21 million. Self sufficiency would require a 250% increase in production and the US just doesn't have the reserves to accomplish that. In terms of price any reasonable increase (or even pie in the sky increase) in US production will be more than offset by increased demand in China and India and since the price of oil and hence gasoline IS determined on a world market the only direction price is going in the long term is up.

The only hope for ending dependence on foreign oil is to end dependence on oil, probably by fast tracking development of liquid fluoride thorium reactors since other alternatives won't cut it and few of us seem to want to do without our energy consuming lifestyles.>> ^blankfist:

Do you mind citing?

>> ^blankfist:

It's not the "drill" part that bothers me. It's the "spill". Face it, we need oil for energy. I wish we didn't but we do.


American oil production capacity is puny. It gets sold on the world market and any increase from opening every protected part of the US to drilling would have a negligible percentile increase in total world-wide oil production. It makes people wealthy, but it doesn't make us any more energy independent.

>> ^quantumushroom:

"Here's my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?
Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge...."
http://tinyurl.com/3afklpq
--Charles Krauthammer


I tried to rape her from the front but she said no. It's her own fault I had to rape her from behind.

>> ^quantumushroom:
"Here's my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?
Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge...."
http://tinyurl.com/3afklpq
--Charles Krauthammer


QM just wants the most negative votes ever on the Video Sift site. That is an accomplishment I reckon.

Why are oil thiefs out 5000 feet? For greed.