San Diego Housing Market News and Analysis

I think this is exactly what Obama wants. In a crisis things can be done under the color or authority to prevent a worse crisis. Bush did it, FDR did it and this is setting us up for a huge socialist agenda and corresponding government intervention for the good of the cause. I believe this is something they could only dream about before:

Rahm Emanuel: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLow

And thanks to the bleeding hearts who voted for him, here it is.

Zeitgeist: And, if they wind up burning the Reichstag next, we're in real trouble!

"... You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that, is it is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. I think America as a whole in 1973 and 1974 - and that’s just my view but I was in the administration - missed the opportunity to deal with the energy crisis that was before us. For a long time our entire energy policy came down to cheap oil. This is an opportunity, what used to be long term problems be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area, things we had postponed for too long that were long term are now immediate and must be dealt with. "

Roubini has been right about so much and if he's scared, then people should be worried.

I see little difference between the socialists and the fascists, just the uniforms. The policies are pretty much the same, big government trumps the individual. The state replaces the family. Either way you get a nanny state.

If you really don't see a difference between François Mitterrand or Olof Palme on one side and Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco on another you might want to work on developing some cricial thinking skills in you next life.

I you can't see that all lefties are reasonable and responsible people who make things work in real life, and all righties are sadists who bring disaster to their countries, then you are an idiot. Did I get that about right, BGinRB?

Nice quote there, Zeit.

[GOP asshole alert...]

Back on topic, Roubini is worried, and that says something. He's the uber-bear. I can't imagine an economy that surprises Roubini on the downside. What a ferocious storm we're facing ahead...

Hate to say it, but I see this lasting into 2010 too. It feels like it's still deteriorating.

Also, I think technological innovations related to energy supplies could really boost our economic outlook. An efficient electric car produced here in the US, for example. Powering SoCal's energy grid with 'farms' of solar panels. Could turn things around...

Agreed. This is the only way that I see that the USA getting out of this. Add stem cell research to the list. Imagine leading the world in these three areas, and exporting it all to the rest of the world. Magic bullet? Unfortunately, everyone else has a 5-15 year head start on us with respect to auto, energy, and stem cells.

Excellent points, afx.

Wow - there are more liberal nut jobs on this board than I thought.

I think zeit is 100% correct.

If you think these so-called green jobs are going to make a dent in this DEPRESSION you are out of your mind.

In the short and medium term, green technologies almost always translates into higher costs for consumers (ie. higher electric bills) not to mention the up front costs. Long term is still an experiment.

Solar farms all over So Cal will save the world, whoopeee! Reality check: it ain't gonna happen.

Damn hippies.

No, you did not get that right, but I can see how a non-analitical mind could misunderstood a single sentence that I wrote.

Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill were all 'righties' who greatly improved lives of their countrymen.
On the other hand, you have socialists like Bettino Craxi who managed to afflict great damage to his country. Success of charlatan Berlusconi can be linked back to Craxi's work.
On the other hand, some might think of Craxi as a great leader since he was instrumental in preventing Italian Communist Party from ascending to the prime minister's position.

Edit: removed a couple of references.

Paramount, just curious what you know about the energy industry, O&G research and exploration, supply and production, pricing, costs, delivery models, risk management, multiplier effects?

What do you know?

Family business on my side, relative in upper echelons of the O&G industry. Things have changed course and the drivers are economics and national security.

Hippy?

You're a fucking loser.

Same with that sad-sack republican party of yours, shipwreck in slow-motion. Not dem but it sure was satisfying to watch them kick you bums in the proverbial nuts last November. You ignorant clowns.

Depression economy, Islamic fundamentalism, peak oil and climate change -- and SIMPLETON RETARDS like you ridicule efforts to re-tool our economy?

What a fucking loser.

"Family business on my side, relative in upper echelons of the industry" to that I say: BFD!

I do know this: if green energy were economically viable on a large scale (or really any scale), that's what would be powering my house and car instead of gas and oil.

Alternative energy will not make a serious dent in our oil, coal or gas consumption in my lifetime or anyone else's on this board.

Most electricity in this country is still generated by coal - and we have plenty left right here in the USA.

FYI: I am not a republican, just someone with "common sense."

What are you going to do if you were the president? Will you just sit tight and wait for the economic bad news to come without doing anything. That is BS.

"Alternative energy will not make a serious dent in our oil, coal or gas consumption in my lifetime or anyone else's on this board."

I double dog dare you to get that as a tattoo.

I don't think there is much difference between all the "isms". Unfortunately people can't step out of there thoroughly propagandized-emotional-buzz word-linear-thinking minds.

Profit ruins capitalism and the state ruins socialism. Otherwise they are both fine. The way of the future is somewhere in between. Me, I'm a free market, no government, communist kinda guy.

Personally I think we are all lab rats in a cheese shortage and new behavior modification stimuli will be introduced in lieu of cheese.

Life is paradoxical time to start thinking that way...

"Common Sense is the sum of our misconceptions since age 18"
Albert Einstein

I do know this if This country billed the Oil Companies
for the cost of all those carrier groups in the middle east,
we'd be paying 5 dollars a gallon for gas.

Also while we have a lot of coal, what is the cost to our
society if we strip mine all of west virginia flat to get it.

Actually, natural gas reserves are strategically more important than coal. Next-generation delivery will be electric and powered from a mixture of sources. The technology and infrastructure is going to require massive public investment and subsidy to develop, in part because we're running out of time. Remaining oil reserves are overstated.

The main issue I have with your post is ridiculing improvements to US energy policy as hippie-green-liberal nonsense. It's this decade-old 'Anti-Gore' GOP talking point bullshit.

There are environmental benefits to energy policy changes, to be sure, but the main drivers are economics and national security. Every business in my field is getting hit by rising utility and energy costs. If we find an answer to this, it has the potential to radically reshape the cost landscape for a wide range of businesses, not to mention spawning a whole new industry.

Basically, while you we're getting all worked up ranting about liberals, or socialism, or Al Gore, or Obama... Whatever. The world moved on.

In the short and medium term, green technologies almost always translates into higher costs for consumers (ie. higher electric bills) not to mention the up front costs. Long term is still an experiment.

Here's the rub. Our pricing mechanism do not translate into proper value. They are myopic, every day there are less and less non-renewable resources and yet the price still goes down. Why is that? The availability is less?

A barrel of oil is equivalent to about a year of human physical labor on a BTU level. BTUs are real our pricing mechanisms are not.

The main issue I have with your post is ridiculing improvements to US energy policy as hippie-green-liberal nonsense. It's this decade-old 'Anti-Gore' GOP talking point bullshit.

Actually, I think it goes back to when Reagan took off the white house solar panels that Carter put on.

BTW, our EXISTING petrol-based energy industry has been the recipient of enormous investments, subsidies and foreign policy support from the United States Government over the last century.

Just don't go yanking my chain about free markets and socialism and how renewable energy will never work because 'Oil and Gas' is as close as you can get to a state-sponsored, state-supported industry.

How much did Iraq cost? Big oil got some tasty contracts from that. That was a huge subsidy. However:

ENERGY IS the capacity to do work (no energy = no work). Thus, the global economy is 100 percent dependent on energy -- it always has been, and it always will be.

THE FIRST LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS tells us that neither capital nor labor nor technology can "create" energy. Instead, available energy must be spent to transform existing matter (e.g., oil), or to divert an existing energy flow (e.g., wind) into more available energy. There are no exceptions to the thermodynamic laws!

THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS tells us that energy is wasted at every step in the economic process. The engines that actually do the work in our economy (so-called "heat engines"; e.g., diesel engines) waste more than 50 percent of the energy contained in their fuel.

ENERGY "RESOURCES" MUST produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called "sinks" (this is known as the "net energy" principle). About 735 joules of energy is required to lift 15 kg of oil 5 meters out of the ground just to overcome gravity -- and the higher the lift, the greater the energy requirements. The most concentrated and most accessible oil is produced first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to find and produce oil. At some point, more energy is spent finding and producing oil than the energy recovered -- and the "resource" has become a "sink".

There is an enormous difference between the net energy of the "highly-concentrated" fossil fuel that power modern industrial society, and the "dilute" alternative energy we will be forced to depend upon as fossil fuel resources become sinks.

No so-called "renewable" energy system has the potential to generate more than a tiny fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels!

So no, there is nothing that compares. Conversely, we don't price it appropriately as I stated in my above post. Because markets on think short term when developing and energy strategy for the future requires long term thinking. Thus, the market can't save us or the mythical invisible hand.

Good point, Arraya.

I wonder how much of the GOP's current anti-environment, anti-conservation policies trace back to Carter's ineptitude in dealing with oil shocks and Middle East matters in the 1970s?

"Confronting Liberals with the facts of reality is very much akin to clubbing baby seals. It gets boring after a while, but because Liberals are so stupid it is easy work."
[Steven M. Barry]

That's dumb, zeit. Blah-blah, liberal-this, blah, blah...

Arraya, back on topic (sort of). I think I remember this bit from CCiv about how history and wealth of civilizations can be measured by their ability to extract energy from their environment. I think this is what you're getting at with the BTUs, and post above. I agree, there's a profound connection.

But I think you're being too pessimistic about what's possible, not being able to replace energy found in fossil fuels. We'll still have petrol, to be sure, but there is an enormous amount of energy present in our natural world. We have only begun to explore and develop next-generation technologies. I'm an optimist.

I suspect future energy supply technologies will trend from macro-generation to micro and be dramatically more decentralized. Such energy sources are harder for large corporations to control and profit from, so I expect the transition will be impeded by the existing energy industry looking to assert an 'interest' in next-generation energy supply models.

The public relations war being waged by established energy interests is a great example of this sort of anti-change activism, and their propaganda seems to have found its way into the clouded minds of a few adherents here on this list. Geology and physics will ultimately decide the day.

I'd say all of it. That is about time the environmental movement started and was demonized. Sadly all the thing they said if we wait 30s years to take care of are all converging at the same time and we did not take care of them.

That's okay, Gandalf I still like you because you are a good husband. I respect Arraya's views, too. They are very consistent and very well researched. You should not worry so much when I joke about liberals. They are almost as fun to watch as the conservatives. I am more concerned about the encroaching power of government in the very marrow of our lives and that is no joking matter. "The State, that is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly, also, it lies, and the lie that creeps from its mouth is this: "I, the State, am the People."
[Nietzsche]

This is what worries me the most, more than who is the President and who runs Congress. It is the prevailing political philosophy that is the most worrisome for me.

Right on, I agree with you, and whether dem or rep (I'm neither), the trend is towards increased government control and consolidation of power. Immediate challenges kind of cloud over this, but on the whole I'm uncomfortable about it too. Things are such a mess right now.

Gandalf, You will be fine. You just have to be thoughtful and not let your emotions override your instinct. I know our ravings sound paranoid. I think watching the people during Katrina was a real eye opener and I have seen government paralyzed during the fires, having sent most of the engines to Lake Arrowhead and farther north. Who did they think was going to fight the fires in San Diego? We were left completely unprotected. I have no faith in government. I respect the work the firefighters do and their bravery, but I have no respect for the huge bureaucracy that takes days to make simple tactical decisions. I think if you plan to take care of yourself and your family for about a week and stay inside and wait out the worst case scenario, be it a man made disaster or a natural, then you will probably be fine. Those who did not plan ahead and cannot survive on what they have in the house, could easily become victims.