Another Peek at the Plateau

Daily analysis of the business of the environment by The Wall Street Journal.

February 27, 2008, 1:33 pm

Posted by Keith Johnson

Neil King reports from Washington, D.C.:

Deutsche Bank’s oil team is jumping into the swirling peak-oil debate, arguing that steep decline rates in existing oil fields will make it all but impossible for producers to break beyond a 100
million-barrel-a-day ceiling.

Peak or Plateau? (Wikipedia)

Their analysis puts the bank, long a big player in the oil patch, among a growing chorus who see the world hitting a production plateau of 100 million barrels a day within seven or eight years. The world is now consuming around 87 million barrels a day, but most institutional forecasts say that demand will top 100 million barrels a day by 2015. The bank says that supply constraints could push the price of oil to $150 a barrel by 2010. The big question will be whether prices at that level will finally lead to a sharp break in demand, something that $100-a-barrel oil has yet to do. Deutsche Bank bases its supply-side gloom on how much harder it is for oil producers to make up the difference for slumping production in aging fields. For the last 36 years the world has managed to add, on average, around 4.2 million barrels a day to annual supplies. But with a conservative 5% decline rate in existing fields, that figure will have to rise to over 7 million barrels a day to get to 100 million barrels a day—a level “that has never been achieved,” according to the report.

But Deutsche Bank is adamant that it is not joining the peak-oil crowd, which the bank slams as being in the “stopped-clock school of analysis.” “We’re not in the crowd that we’re all doomed,
we’ve had it,” says Deutsche analyst Paul Sarkey, one of the report’s authors. “We can handle this.”

Instead, the growing school of supply plateauists — which already includes the CEOs of Total and ConocoPhillips — has justgotten one bank larger.

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The Nerve and the Will

back in May 2007, during a post on Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I promised a post on schnabel's other two movies.

By Sanford Schwartz

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film directed by Julian Schnabel

Before Night Falls, a film directed by Julian Schnabel

Basquiat, a film directed by Julian Schnabel

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

by Jean-Dominique Bauby, translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt

Vintage, 132 pp., $12.95 (paper)

C.V.J.: Nicknames of Maitre D's & Other Excerpts from Life

by Julian Schnabel

Random House, 222 pp. (1987)

For those of us who have followed Julian Schnabel's larger-than-life career as an artist for nearly thirty years, watching his new movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a doubly extraordinary experience. It is a film that presents a nightmarish and almost unbearable medical case history that has been handled with humor, a lyrical deftness, and a remarkable absence of sentimentality; and if you have more than a passing sense of Schnabel the person and his work as a painter, your mind is running at the same time on a parallel track, one full of amazement and almost disbelief that, with no apparent training in theater arts or the directing of actors, or even a feeling for photography, he has turned himself into a sometime moviemaker—this is his third film—of such drive and sensitivity. The movie is about a patient's transformation of himself as he lies in a hospital bed; and it has been made by someone who, with a perhaps related kind of strength, is similarly extending himself.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is based on the book of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby. The editor of the French fashion magazine Elle, Bauby suffered a stroke at the end of 1995, at forty-three, that left him paralyzed from head to toe and able only to use his mind, to hear from one ear (in a muffled way), to move his head a little (with a huge effort), to grunt out the letters of the alphabet (after considerable therapy), and most crucially to see from his left eye and to blink its lid. A victim of what is known as locked-in syndrome, Bauby learned how to communicate through a collaborative process. As someone read to him letters of the alphabet, he would, through blinking at the letter he needed, spell out words......

Like Basquiat, Schnabel's 1996 film about the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Before Night Falls, of 2000, about the exiled Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is first and foremost a crisp, craftsmanly piece of work, stylish to the degree that the material calls for it and always driven by the needs of the story. Each of the movies, furthermore, is about an actual person of real accomplishment who came to an untimely death.

And like The Diving Bell, Schnabel's earlier movies are graced by images of being on, by, or immersed in water. When Basquiat fantasizes about his future he looks up and sees, above the tops of city buildings, a sky that has become one big ocean wave with surfers carving down it. In Before Night Falls, Arenas's moments of wider understanding, whether concerning his artistic identity, his sexuality, or his political freedom, are inseparable from his being, respectively, in the rain, by a river, or diving into the sea....

Before Night Falls, though, was a huge step forward. It, too, presents a person making his way through a distinct social milieu, in this case Castro's Cuba during the 1960s and 1970s, when individual liberties were first celebrated and soon eradicated. Based on Arenas's autobiography of the same title, the movie at its core is an urgent and affectionate portrait of a man who rose from a background of dirt-poor farmers in the hinterland to become an internationally recognized writer— and who was brutally punished for his views by Castro's regime and eventually died in New York, a decade after he was able to leave Cuba, of AIDS.

Schnabel is as intimate and down-to-earth about Arenas's life as a homosexual, and about the texture of Hispanic Caribbean culture, as he is about the hospital world Jean-Dominique Bauby inhabits. But Before Night Falls is a richer and deeper movie than The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It encompasses grittier and more tumultuous experiences and revolves around a person (played by Javier Bardem without, it seems, a false moment) who grows as we watch from a cautious kid to a lovely young man and then finally to a self-assured and hardly cautious lover and writer whose refusal to conform leads to imprisonment and torture.

Read the full review

Help George Fall (stress management technique)

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William Klein

* 1928 USA Lives/works in Paris
Link 1 Link2

A Strike in the Dark

Annals of National Security

What did Israel bomb in Syria?

by Seymour M. Hersh February 11, 2008

Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border. The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war. But in the immediate aftermath nothing was heard from the government of Israel. In contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.

Within hours of the attack, Syria denounced Israel for invading its airspace, but its public statements were incomplete and contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some munitions in an unpopulated area after being challenged by Syrian air defenses, “which forced them to flee.” Four days later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said during a state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no casualties or property damage. It was not until October 1st that Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an interview with the BBC, acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes had hit their target, which he described as an “unused military building.” Assad added that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments were muted.

Despite official silence in Tel Aviv (and in Washington), in the days after the bombing the American and European media were flooded with reports, primarily based on information from anonymous government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed a nascent nuclear reactor that was secretly being assembled in Syria, with the help of North Korea. Beginning construction of a nuclear reactor in secret would be a violation of Syria’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.

The evidence was circumstantial but seemingly damning. The first reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear coöperation came on September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four points: the Israeli intelligence community had learned of a North Korean connection to a construction site in an agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before the bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean; satellite imagery strongly suggested that the building under construction was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be stopped. There were also reports—by ABC News and others—that some of the Israeli intelligence had been shared in advance with the United States, which had raised no objection to the bombing.

Read the full article on The New Yorker

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats