Whenever I get weighed down by a deadline (or two) it is hard to break through the writing resistance. Since I am back in the blogging saddle these past couple of days, I have made a couple of posts in my other blogs but have yet to do so here.

On our own food security:

• A Snippet of my Edible Summer
• A Fall Fowl Phalanx

On the global food security tragedy of Melamine:

• Melamine, oh thy name is legion

There is also the whole massive ball of uncertainty that clouds the current economic environment along with the dangerous volatility in oil and gas prices.

I personally dislike the mental mania that leads to the massive lows we had the last couple of weeks and the high we got yesterday close to 900 up on the DOW. I guess I just do not have enough testosterone to enjoy such silly swings, my estrogen and progesterone say – shoot for steady state homeostasis that doesn’t lead to hyperbolic crashes every day. Is this too much to ask? Yes, indeed, I think it is.

The sludgy miasma of conflicting indicators that surrounds us makes peak oil aware people even more edgy because the cognitive dissonance between the slump in crude prices, the drop in gas prices, and our empty bank accounts and bleeding treasuries seem to tell us that these indicators either are irrelevant or confounded in painfully complicated ways.

I think that the psychology and dynamics of oil price, use, demand, supply and futures are profoundly non-intuitive to begin with and then it’s been toxified by the inrush of derivative loving speculators who are trying to catch an up or downdraft to re-coup losses elsewhere.

Thing is, we seem to have been on a steady downturn in crude prices that has a downward price support for a few weeks. It means I can drive to work on less expensive gas but it has a very huge negative impact on peak oil.

The demand destruction that followed our price shock this summer lead to real changes in American gas usage, this WILL reverse as the price goes down.

With this fall in prices and the collapse of credit markets, exploration of new resources is truly dying on the vine (they were rather feeble in some ways to begin with).

On top of this, current reserves are starting to prove out to be less than promised.

Carola Hoyos and Javier Blas in The Financial Times (London, October 28 2008), in an article called “World Will Struggle To Meet Oil Demand” report that the International Energy Agency’s annual report, the World Energy Outlook

Output from the world’s oilfields is declining faster than previously thought
…
“The future rate of decline in output from producing oilfields as they mature is the single most important determinant of the amount of new capacity that will need to be built globally to meet demand,” the IEA says.

The watchdog warned that the world needed to make a “significant increase in future investments just to maintain the current level of production”.

Oil Price Shock 2.0

There are some, even in the face of the current downward trend in crude prices, that are suggesting that the rebound, when the price support for bottom is felt, will be severe.

Guy Chazan writing for the Wall Street Journal in an article called “Oil-Price Rebound Could Be Severe” published today (Oct 29, 2008), suggests:

The slump in oil prices has spread relief among consumers and fuel-reliant industries, but also is squeezing the companies who could invest in new sources of oil — spurring concerns that prices will prompt them to shelve investments.

and

“Low oil prices are very dangerous for the world economy,” said Mohamed Bin Dhaen Al Hamli, the United Arab Emirates’ energy minister, speaking Tuesday at an oil-industry conference in London. “We need an adequate and reasonable oil price that will continue to stimulate investment.” With prices now languishing, he said, “a lot of projects that are in the pipeline are going to be reassessed.”

Rationale is:

Nobuo Tanaka, head of the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based watchdog, was one of several experts at the annual Oil and Money conference here predicting that the industry could be setting the stage for yet another supply-and-demand whiplash down the road. “We’re concerned that supply won’t catch up with demand after this crisis,” Mr. Tanaka said. “The supply crunch may come again, but in a more acute way.”

Big Sighs

Yeah, its all non-intuitive, not even counter-intuitive. Demand destruction is a complex phenomenon and hard to predict in terms of when it might ease and then signal the upward spike that the oil producers will ensure as soon as the supply – demand spread narrows. They are dropping their output now and will certainly not be in the mood to throttle back up next time we consumer nations bleat about unfair pricing.

Each price shock conditions the entire market. Each player learns a certain lesson. I think it would take a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, psychics, and informatics statisticians to be able to model the various scenarios as we proceed through the descending collapse levels.

I found it difficult to drive home on my commute yesterday, was crying freakish cognitive dissonance tears, nauseating trills of fear mixed with free floating anxieties from work (am simply submerged with deadlines) and the market dive at the end of the day. Also, am feeling involuntary shockwaves of similar emotions since I learned that my mother’s entire nest egg which my dad worked himself to the bone to provide before he died - its now down to $0.00 because of the market.

I was crying while driving because I was listening to Romanian poet and editor of the Exquisite Corpse Andrei Codrescu’s tremendous Post Carbon Screed on NPR called “After The Bailout“. (that link will take you to the text and a button to listen to it in Prof. Codrescu’s wonderful accented reading)

In it he says things like:

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of ‘em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I’m fixin’ to make the thing run on plum brandy. I’ve got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

Then it got more brutal.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I’m a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

“What did you do wrong?” I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

“Nothing,” he said. “We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn’t turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In.”

Go read the whole thing!

This man is simply fantastic, he never fails to jolt me from my spot. He is my nihilist muse, perhaps I was Romanian in some prior reality.

Molly describes nicely the reaction of one real person to learning about Peak Oil and then stepping up to impact her world.

We are so numb in our odd little multi-media cocoons as we learn about peak oil and societal collapse in the abstract - we read mass media opinion leaders like Kunstler and we read the PO blogs and we imagine that there is some specific way it will “go down” and that there will be some best-fit response or some most likely outcome in terms of how it will effect our lives.

We do not realize that the very multimedia lives that we live and use to learn about these meta-phenomena themselves is part of our peak world - it will fall away and we will be left with what we only really have, our immediate environment. It wont matter what Kunstler opined -our own collapse realities will be our own and it will reflect our own world view and how that informs our reaction to collapse.

So, for some, it means hiding from the zombies - and they will. For others, it means being the zombie, and they will. For yet others, it will be about dominating others to harness resources - and they will. And yet others, it will be about choosing the positive outlook. Not because they are simple/uninformed or because that is the 100% “correct” choice nor because they are naive and can not conceive of the evil way - no. I think they (and I think I am one of those) will choose a positive world outlook (eg., the Holmgren green life boat) because we understand how we choose our world every moment of the day and that we choose to strive for and live in harmony.

Transition will be individualized - it cant be otherwise.

To be able to survive and thrive in the descent, a person, family, community, and society needs to have persistent resilience. Thats not about effective gardening so much as being able to build a mindset that keep you interested in getting up in the morning day after day, year after year, and doing the hard work of subsistence living.

It wont be like pioneering days because we will not becoming from some developed context to conquer a new land with open possibilities. We will be dealing with the massive negative impact of loosing those open possibilities - that paradise lost. Our cultural psyche is not about just getting buy, its about dominance and time’s arrow pointing toward our American Dominance in some rosy future.

With the energy descent - that simply will not exist. People who can not let that particular fantasy go, along with its well understood success metrics will not be able to summon and sustain the resilience to make it through the transition.

The spectrum of stories there is simply amazing. Here is my little contribution and response.

As you likely know, if you have read my “about me” page, I am a scientist and did not participate in any of the recent financial festivities (as in the dot com boom).. I have not experienced personal wealth in any way – only personal debt (school debts, house, car, all while living frugally – our family has never been on a vacation, period, we do not go out to eat - its ok, we have each other) .. we have had a mortgage since 1995 so I have been living with the implications of that these past 13 years.

I think I need to get one thing off my chest.

Whether things are booming or not, losing your job and then losing your house has been a real possibility for most of us for many years. We middle class have been living on that edge all our lives.

Don’t imagine that this is something new. Its important to not ascribe this sort of scenario only to the collapse paradigm.

Why? Because if you get all wrapped up in it that way you will lose any chance at resilience.

I guess its about waking up.

Part of waking up to peak oil is to realize that our consensus reality has been holding us back. That middle class consensus reality masked the edge-nature of our existence. We chose to believe that we were entitled.

We are not.

– Repeat after me –

We. Are. Entitled. To. Nothing.

Our gift right now is of time but its not really about bunkering down.

Its about releasing the entitlement mentality and embracing change and then understanding resilience and cultivating some level of optimism.

I am a mom of three – last winter, when I GOT peak oil on an intuitive level, the first thing I mourned was peak education.

I had to realize that there is simply no way that I could afford to put even one child through college (I went to school on Pell Grants and scholarships, my parents didn’t pay for the core costs tho they did cover food and dorm – never cheap – don’t know what Pell Grants are? Ask the republicans and Reagan specifically).

I panicked and then did that V-8 head-bonk thing .. I have known this for a long time but was never able to articulate it. It was freeing in some ways to realize that the cost of education has become CRIMINALLY expensive.

Not only do we homeschool, I intend to steer my children into organic farming internships and agricultural sciences. Not so much because that is how we will survive but because those activities will make SENSE. My job .. it doesn’t make SENSE in the transition. That’s ok, I have learned one important thing in grad school – how to learn.

I am not saying that things are peachy or that it’s the apocalypse nor am I saying that you should not prepare.

I am getting ready to buy a year or two’s worth of bulk white rice (228.1 pounds/year) that will shore up our food budget. Our protein comes from our laying chickens; our dairy comes from our dairy goats. We will be picking up our three breeding pigs in a couple of weeks. We need to lay in bulk purchases of feed for these animals and I need to get an agreement squared away with neighboring fields to plant mangels and greens in the spring for the animals (perhaps some wheat too).

We JUST installed our high efficiency Seton wood fired boiler in our basement. We are now 100% oil free (we live in rural MA – it gets a bit cold here – you will be hearing a about the north east this winter and you might ask yourself – why didn’t the states do anything? Yeah, so will we. If we have to, we will shelter neighbors who cant afford heat). Word has gotten around the surrounding towns about our new fangled boiler – people are asking my husband about it at town meetings. Seems they are all waiting to see how it goes. Not sure what their metric will be but I think that there will be a demand especially because the state will be changing the rules to NOT allowing outside polluting wood boilers that have proliferated here recently. Our set up is as expensive or less and much more efficient.

I will update about all this here soon – if you are interested in learning about Mr. Seton’s fantastic wood fired boiler that takes unsplit 4 foot long tree logs and is so efficient that it just goes in your basement and no real smoke out the top – drop me a note here. Here is a link to some pics of the boiler before it was hooked up to the system – will be shooting the boiler this weekend now that its installed.

I feel like we are all squirreling away our little nuts and getting our little spreadsheets balanced.

What I don’t feel yet is that whole community thing and I don’t think that will happen while we are still, as a class, waiting for the housing market to come back, our money market funds to rally back, the oil prices to come down, the interest rates to drop, etc etc.

If you live in the MA region and would like to learn about some Transition Town stuff going on – Rob Riman has been working really hard in Cambridge to bring TT training going in the Boston area – here is some info on that:

The events currently scheduled for the Northeast are as follows:

Tues. Sept. 16th - GreenPort Forum: Transition Towns Intro (Cambridge, MA)

Sat./Sun. Oct. 4th/5th - Training for Transition course (Cambridge, MA)
Sat./Sun. Nov. 1st/2nd - Training for Transition course (Cambridge, MA)
Sat/Sun. Nov. 22nd/23rd - Training for Transition course (Cambridge, MA)

To learn more and to register visit this link

If any of you all choose to do this please let me know so we can meet up and network!

Resilience. Hope. No Entitlements. Transition. Action.

As many of you know, I live in Massachusetts. The farmers almanac says that this winter season is going to be a doozy (colder, more snows, especially in Feb).

There is some rumblings amongst the MA state gov re: “warning” people that their oil heating bills are going to be “bad” this year but I have not heard of any solutions. I think congress just underfunded LIHEAP so don’t look for federal help. This is simply talk talk talk, where are the initiatives?

I need help envisioning how this all might play out.

There will be successive waves of people from low income to higher scale incomes that will hit a point this winter after which they can no longer afford to pay for the next tank of heating oil, let alone feed themselves. Our oil companies in this region stopped giving credit some time ago, how many people will have space on their CCs to take up the difference?

Many of our oil companies have gone out of business so our in-state oil stock piles have also been reduced. That increases the brittle nature of our situation.

Somebody help me here.

I am having a hard time envisioning what the state gov COULD do with 100,000s of people and families that have no money for heating oil and who cant just up and leave because their jobs are HERE. You cant ask all those people to sleep in school gyms (and who is going to pay to heat those school gyms? School budgets are already overshot by many many 1000s of $$ in all towns).

Massachusetts and the Northeast is wholly NOT resilient to this and I simply can not imagine how this breakdown will happen without serious societal upheaval (tho even that is hard to see, Americans really do NOT take to the street and it will be colder out there in the whipping winds than huddled inside a cold house).

What could the contingency plan be? My frustration stems from the obvious nature of the coming problem and how there really is no way to address this issue unless you bus 100,000s of bankrupt freezing people down to South Texas to warm climate refugee camps.

What then, after surviving winter? You are left with no money, HUGE debt, how can people eat? Pay mortgages? If I can imagine this part, I am sure others can too.

I am thinking, beyond the unthinkable nature of winter in the northeast this year, there will be a sea change in the way people view the northeast as inhabitable year round.

We, me and my family, have been living without oil all summer long and minimal oil for years (we use an in-house wood stove). This has been the summer of no showers - pure misery .. warm water splashes to get clean (I have three small kids and I work full time - clean has to happen).

We will be fine because of the great loving-kindness of a family member who has helped us get the money for a high efficiency wood fired boiler that will heat our house and our water. It uses half the amount of fuel and can take girnormous uncut logs as fuel.

Some people think that cheap pellet stoves will get them through but they will find the cost of pellets shooting through the roof very quickly and also that their efficiencies will be so low that they will go through tons of pellets like they are a few buckets.

Other people think they can fire up ancient coal fired stoves that have been lurking in their Victorian basements for many decades. I think we will hear too many stories about carbon monoxide this winter, too many to bear.

Once the Olympics are done, we will be back on the road to hell as China’s industries roar back to fossil fuel eating life. India’s productivity has been suppressed during this “quiet time” in China. India too will roar back to life. Soon that new Indian micro-car will hit the market and the Indian Car Parity Disaster will be well on its way.

So, no, those lose crude prices you see right now, they are VERY temporary.

Someone, anyone, can you imagine how this is going to play out this winter in the Northeast?

I would love to hear it.

(Cross-posted at DailyKos on 8-22-08)

As of this writing, light sweet crude is down $4.04 for the day to $124.38/barrel. I can not help but feel an infinitesimal loosening of stress in my body (mostly in the gut) when I hear the price ticking down. I expect it to go back up and keep going, in due course, but these few days of down-tick serve to help one integrate the experience versus feeling the nail-scratching slide over the edge.

Truly, it is mostly a moment to reflect on what yet needs to be done. We need to get the funds together to get that wood fired furnace/water heating system in place, for the 4 season greenhouse in the backyard so that our garden can feed us longer/better (see this link for those details - Humble Garden) so many things yet to do.

What little we save from a slight dip in gas prices should and will be pumped into these activities.

On NPR the other day, I heard news about how the meat industry is warning that meat prices will soon jump 25% and Kraft warning that their products will jump some 20 – 25%. I have been wondering when this would finally happen, its been like waiting for a shoe to drop. They admitted in the report that costs had not been passed on to consumers in recent times but that they can no longer afford to hold back (perhaps they were waiting for an unspoken consensus for an industry wide jump so that the consumer had no where to turn – “trust” issues?)

I am sure you know, there are oil related reasons for food prices to spike (Ammonia for fertilizers require petroleum for the haber-bosch process (WIKI LINK), diesel for machinery, transport, electricity for cooling etc), there are climate change reasons for the spike – midwest’s flooding problems (one predicted aspect of climate change is focalized storm excesses leading to flooding (LINK for a bit of a review) and also extended drought), there is the impact of biofuel subsidies driving farmers to pull marginal (flood protective) lands out of fallow/conservation into monoculture of corn/soybeans and also to convert any of their other fields that may have been growing non-corn into corn, and likely other dynamics I am not yet really in touch with.

Heck even the price of popcorn in the movie theater is being impacted (though I suspect that this venue – pure luxury and compulsive eating – is likely to spike somewhat artificially). NPR reported on this on July 14, 2008:

The cost of popcorn is up. Jim Boyd, a movie theater owner in Van Wert, Ohio, says he pays 50 percent more for a bag of popcorn than he did at the beginning of 2008.

School will soon be back in session and I do not know how our local elementary school (which is chronically underfunded, across the board) will feed the kids anything but the most depleted crap. NPR did a piece on this on June 24th, 2008 (LINK)

Lennon had a taste of sticker shock this year, when milk prices rose 21 percent — an added expense of almost $60,000 to her overall budget of $3 million a year. She handled that by raising the price of the a la carte items the school cafeterias offer — like individual cookies and juice drinks. But such patches only go so far.

…

So Chicopee (MA) is finding other ways to fill the gaps: extras like Jell-O and cake are out, and Fairview cook manager Susan Lacasse says one day’s leftover spaghetti goes into the next day’s soup.

From TIME:

Higher prices are also calling into question one of the staples of kiddie cafeterias. “Do we have to really offer milk with every breakfast and every lunch we serve?” Pavel Matustik, who runs nutrition programs for five school districts in southern California, asked during his testimony before Congress Wednesday. For every penny the price of milk goes up, he added, the cost of preparing school meals increases $54 million nationally.

This is, perhaps, before the most recent statements referenced above about the 25% increase. If so, there may come a point where school lunch collapses as a viable program. I can promise you it was already on the very edge before this oil shock. The VERY edge.

The only reason why our little school district can keep it’s buses running this year and heat the buildings is because they had negotiated the price of heating fuel and diesel BEFORE the shock.

Come time for those contracts to be up, I am not certain what our town will do. Our town of 1700 people usually has to choose between paying for salt and plowing in the winter and the school or for the senior center. Soon, I think town meetings will be even MORE contentious and depressing than they usually are.

“Clop clop clop” the noise droned her to a quiet meditation as she and the horse lurched ahead of the others, a bit of a trot into some shade both she and the animal appreciated. Their makeshift wagon carried baskets, covered by white cloths, filled with aged goats cheese and fresh bread. She had pulled these toothsome grainy loaves from their earthen bread oven that morning, ducking as the poof of hot moisture blasted past the broken clay seal on the door.

She loved days like this, market days, because it was a chance to meet up with neighbors who lived on the other side of town. It never really mattered that the news seemed to stay the same – someone gave birth, someone moved away, a newcomer had settled at the homestead they claimed they had inherited when their grandmother had passed on. No real new news was fine; she had her fill of news when she was a child, back during the transition.

Her meditation must have veered toward lethargy and sleep because she awoke to the singular smell of the town reclamation facilities. Her horse, which knew the way to market better than she did, was passing what had been a landfill in previous times. She covered her nose and mouth and, even though the smell was overwhelming, stopped a moment to marvel at the operation. Above her rose a hill, shining bright and glossy in the sunlight. She didn’t remember what it looked like before the facility had been built, she only knew it with the containment dome hovering over the site.

The roundness of the dome was broken only by a smokestack, steaming from the middle. It was actually more correct to call it a steam-stack because this facility was allowed to release only water vapor. It still smelled. The smell, which must have come from something in the steam and perhaps around the pipes that emerged from the dome or when the double air-locked doors were opened, it was a heavy stench that seemed to be unique to this particular place.

At her home, garbage was really not an issue. All waste was organic and went into the compost. Ever since people began growing their own food and had to package their own products if they were going to barter them (no one sold things anymore, or very rarely), the packaging was made from things on hand like baskets or sacks. Plastics had long since been appropriated by the reclamation company.

She knew a little about what went on inside the dome. She had learned as a kid that old landfills, which had previously been liabilities (rightfully so in terms of the poisons seeping from them) were now profit centers. The impossibly large hills had been enclosed by the white domes, the overfill dirt had been peeled back and the contents sifted and then fed into the maw of the Fischer-Tropsch conversion furnaces. There, plastics and organics were transformed into SynGas. Large barrel-bellied tanker trucks would lumber up to the facility on occasion, belching acrid biodiesel haze, and cart the gas away to Boston or Worcester where it would be sold to the highest bidder. Supposedly, the state of Massachusetts used those monies for second generation transition projects but she never saw any evidence of that.

She wasn’t terribly interested in the whole thing other than to wonder how long it would take for the site to be depleted and for the whole thing to be dismantled and taken away.

She nudged her horse because the day had worn on and the market would soon open. She wanted to barter her cheeses and breads for some open pollinated barely and wheat seed and perhaps get a chance to catch the noontime concert on the green, acoustic Spanish guitar and some traveling dancers.

As I eat homegrown boiled eggs and some salad from the cafeteria, I surf the web here in the company canteen on free wireless..

As I surf sites like:

• The Great Turning Times
• Toward a resilience psychology in response to climate change
• The waking up syndrome by Sarah Anne Edwards and Linda Buzzell
• Transition Culture

I also sit bathed in the outflow from a flatscreen TV floating from the ceiling above me, spewing CNN’s lunch hour panic.. talk of “Issue #1″ and oil prices and the fed and ads for “Clean Coal” and “Clean Air Nuclear Power” sheets down over me as I try to find some balance and resilience.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed with the normal MSM non-reporting on peak oil but the drum beat now is growing more intense by the day.

Its like this self-perpetuating feedback loop between CNN hyper-real reporting on oil shock, peak oil, the Dervae’s growing their own self sufficient world and then the greenwashing ads that are so cynical in the extreme. (Clean Coal has fallen on VERY tough times, you do not hear about this in the news, just the green washing ads).

Pre-awakened people must be experiencing an acceleration of the process, perhaps prematurely because they may not be able to reflect on what is “really” going on and perhaps they will just melt-down into a subconscious driven generalized anxiety attack.

I can not imagine a worse way to prepare the public!

As they say, failing to plan is planning for failure.

We are enjoying our independence from the food chain. We get our eggs and our milk (and now cheese) from our backyard. We eat our salads from our backyard.

If you don’t now, what are you waiting for?!

If you think food prices are high now, you will be pale with shock soon enough. Think oil-based fertilizers, oil-based pesticides, oil-run tractors and trucks, think floods, think drought, think 2008.

The seed companies are reporting a 40% rise in seed sales this year (they were shocked, didn’t see it coming, these people need to get on the web more often).

Now that the baby goats are not such babies and are fully weaned, we have more goat milk to work with. We go through less than 1 gallon of fluid goat milk a day for Baby O (who adores goat milk and is sensitive to lactose in pasteurized cow milk).

Our milking doe, Torte, gives us about one and 1/2 gallons of milk a day. Over two days, we then have one extra gallon of milk, works out nicely.

You may or may not know that it is hard to make cream or butter from goat milk because the fat doesn’t separate out (because the fat globules are smaller and stay spread out, like its been homogenized). We could make it if we bought a $400.00 cream separator but thats not going to happen! I love goat cheese just fine.

We will be getting a jersey cow/calf to have super high quality milk, cream, and butter. I can wait for that.

Back to the topic for today.

It is VERY easy to make chevre but it takes a few days, you simply have to be patient.

We are using milk we pasteurized for this batch, we may go raw with he next batch.

We used a chevre starter from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, I can not recommend them highly enough.

This little packet is enough for one gallon of milk. This could not be easier, you just bring your milk up to (or down to as the case may be) to 86 F and sprinkle the starter in. Mix well and let culture at room temperature for 12-20 hours.

The curd sets up and excludes the whey.

You then slice it up a bit so that the mass of curd is broken up and more whey is excluded.

Remember that all of the equipment being used must be sterilized.

We bought the plastic chevre molds from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company which I cleaned very well.

These are well worth the cost and will last a long time.

Using a sterilized slotted spoon, you scoop out the curds and begin to fill the molds.

One gallon of milk yielded three molds worth of cheese.

Once they are filled they go on a wire rack over a pan or bucket to catch the dripping whey, cover the tops and let sit at room temperature or in the fridge for 2 days. They will shrink a lot.

After the two days, the cups were no longer dripping and the cheese was quite firm and much dryer.

This cheese tastes unbelievably fresh and, I think, uniquely ours. Its a fantastic feeling to sit down to a salad that we grew topped with chevre we made from our own goat. I watched Torte munching on tree bark in our backyard as I nibbled on the cheese.

Resources:

• New England Cheesemaking Supply Company
• Chevre Starter
• Plastic cheese molds
• Books on making cheese
• Classes on making cheese

The inefficiencies in the oil market could strike you dumb, honestly. I am just scratching the surface in terms of understanding the complexities and the various moving chokepoints and my brain hurts much.

One might sift through the vast quantities of fact, theory, and speculation (all of which becomes the same sickly shade of grey when you consider that none of this is a science but rather about mob rule and some of the basest of human nature) only to come up for a breath, lost in a turmoil of confusion.

Is it better to skim the top level news outlets (we know its not) or to dive deep into the technical trading deep-end where the majority of everything becomes arbitrary nothingness to even the most diligent of students.

I fear one needs a sort of economic genome project with extensive annotations and a whole new petrochemical informatics to wade through this turbulent ocean.

By way of example, not all oil is the same, as you might expect. Just as black truffles cost more than white and Matsutake mushrooms cost more than button mushrooms (like 100 to 0.01), so too does the value of oil vary from well to well.

Each well has its own special geological conditions that give rise to different oil qualities. Things like water, dirt, and sulphur contamination are considered in the grade of oil. See this link for a better understanding of Petroleum.

A barrel of Saudi Heavy crude (2.8% sulfur, 27 API gravity) is intrinsically worth less than a barrel of Nigerian Bonny Light (0.14% sulfur, 34 API), because the former will yield less high-value gasoline, diesel and jet fuel than the latter without intensive refining. But how much more a barrel of Bonny Light commands in the market depends on the relative prices of all the various petroleum products when it is sold, along with the location and availability of spare capacity in the complex refineries that have the hardware to overcome those intrinsic quality differences. SOURCE

Now, to extend this sort of analysis, the “price” for a barrel of oil from one exchange to the next is not the same either!

There is the price as it is trading on any particular day and there are “future” spot prices (as you would find on other commodities like corn or wheat or pork bellies).

I will not pretend to understand this (this is where that informatics would come in handy but what can you do!).

Today’s prices and the future price can be very different.

Now, when it comes to what a refinery pays for a barrel of crude coming in it’s doors for processing, you would think the price they pay is the going rate THAT DAY. It SEEMS that this is intuitive.

Intuition fails here though.

See below for an explanation on why the actual cost of oil going into refineries is different from what you might think (as in what you see on NYMEX, etc).

The growth of the futures exchanges over the last two decades has fundamentally changed oil trading. Most oil is now bought and sold on price formulas pegged to the futures prices, or to published market reports strongly influenced by the futures. What traders are agreeing to when they do a deal is not a fixed price, but a fixed differential above or below a particular futures contract during a set period, usually aligned with the time when the shipment will be loaded or delivered. So while these differentials fluctuate due to a variety of factors, the price that refiners pay for crude oil remains directly tied to the futures price. That means that anything that drives up the futures market, whether a disruption in supply, higher demand, or speculation by a new class of commodity investors, has a direct impact on what we all pay for the products that refineries make. SOURCE

This is an unhappy phenomenon because futures seem to be exquisitely vulnerable to the vagaries of mob action and rumor and that basest human behavior thing again (greed and panic being just two of very many).

Reminds me of Popeye’s Whimpy when he says “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today“.

That Tuesday? Its rushing right at us.