December 30, 2010
— DrewM Game changer?
On Wednesday, the frenzy got fresh fuel: Noble confirmed its earlier estimates that the field contains 16 trillion cubic feet of gas—making it the world's biggest deepwater gas find in a decade, with enough reserves to supply Israel's gas needs for 100 years.It's still early days, and getting all that gas out of the seabed may be more difficult than it seems today. But Noble and its partners think the field could hold enough gas to transform Israel, a country precariously dependent on others for energy, into a net-energy exporter.
I'm guessing energy starved countries in Europe and around the world are suddenly going to have a new found respect for their favorite whipping boy. It's one thing to beat up a relatively poor country with nothing you need, it's quite another to deal with an increasingly prosperous country that exports a vital commodity. Ask the various Gulf states how they'd be treated if they weren't sitting on so much Black Gold.
As Eli Lake imagined it on Twitter (where I first saw this):
Dear Europe, Stop trying our officials in absentia and maybe we'll give u better prices than Gazprom. Yours, Israel
Naturally, no good thing is ever cost free. The usual suspects are using this to stir up trouble.
Despite these problems, Israel's gas find is making waves abroad. Lebanon has staked out its own claim to offshore gas. In August, lawmakers in Beirut rushed the country's first oil-exploration law through its normally snarled parliament.Lebanon's oil minister, Gebran Bassil, an ally of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, said in late October that his ministry hopes to start auctioning off exploration rights by 2012.
Iran, Israel's arch-nemesis and Hezbollah's chief backer, has also weighed in. Tehran's ambassador to Lebanon, Qazanfar Roknabadi, last month claimed that three-quarters of the Leviathan field actually belongs to Lebanon.
Mr. Landau, the Israeli infrastructure minister, denied the claim and warned Lebanon that Israel wouldn't hesitate to use force to protect its mineral rights.
No doubt the Obama administration is hard at work trying to figure out how to force Israel into not only a freeze on settlement construction but also an off-shore drilling moratorium.
It's going to be awhile before they can start exploiting this find but it seems a new and large variable has been added to the complex Mideast equation.
Posted by: DrewM at
09:30 AM
| Comments (56)
Post contains 410 words, total size 3 kb.
Posted by: Bosk at December 30, 2010 09:37 AM (pUO5u)
No doubt the Obama administration is hard at work trying to figure out how to force Israel into not only a freeze on settlement construction but also an off-shore drilling moratorium.
The most sarcastic snarks have become statements of fact in the Obamunist world.
Posted by: Curmudgeon at December 30, 2010 09:38 AM (ujg0T)
Posted by: *Cynical* torabora at December 30, 2010 09:39 AM (QEmqs)
Off Topic, but this a a TOTALLY WTF article:
Transcending the Human, DIY Style
Lepht Anonym wants everyone to know the door to transcending normal human capabilities is no farther away than your own kitchen. ItÂ’s just going to hurt like a sonofabitch.
Anonym is a biohacker, a woman who has spent the last several years learning how to extend her own senses by putting tiny magnets and other electronic devices under her own skin, allowing her to feel electromagnetic fields, or – if her latest project works – even magnetic north.
Since doctors wonÂ’t help her, she does it in her own apartment, sterilizing her equipment (needles, scalpels, vegetable peelers) with vodka. Good anesthetic is largely impossible to buy, so she screams a little, and sometimes passes out. But itÂ’s worth it, for whatÂ’s on the other side.
[ . . . ]
So she began experimenting with homebrewed sensors. The metal itself is extremely toxic, so she needed a coating to bioproof it, finding a solution ultimately in a silicon putty-like substance called Sugru. But hot-gun glue works fine too, she says. (“I have lots of things in me coated in hot-gun glue,” she says.)
[ . . . ]
The medical consequences can be both severe and likely to elicit hostility from doctors. SheÂ’s put herself in the hospital several times. She nearly lost a fingertip the first time she tried to implant a neodymium disc herself. Various experiments with bioproofing have failed, with implants rusting under her skin, or her own self-surgeries turning septic.
But if that list of horrors isnÂ’t enough to scare someone off, sheÂ’s also eager to help others avoid some of the mistakes sheÂ’s made in learning.
------
There's even more crazy in the entire article.
Posted by: Ed Anger at December 30, 2010 09:44 AM (7+pP9)
Posted by: Andrew Ian Dodge at December 30, 2010 09:46 AM (ROQj7)
Posted by: Oldsailor at December 30, 2010 09:47 AM (AovJ3)
Posted by: Burn the Witch at December 30, 2010 09:48 AM (fLHQe)
Posted by: pep at December 30, 2010 09:49 AM (3ll0O)
Posted by: tangonine at December 30, 2010 09:51 AM (x3YFz)
Posted by: Mini-Mao at December 30, 2010 09:52 AM (ZTPeW)
Posted by: Brian at December 30, 2010 09:54 AM (sYrWB)
Yeah, there are a lot of ways this could play out. Unfortunately, history indicates it will be one of the messier, less optimal paths they wind up going down.
Posted by: DrewM. at December 30, 2010 09:55 AM (HicGG)
The Romans killed Jesus. The execution had to happen under Roman authority. Yes SOME of the Pharisees wanted Jesus out of the way, but the Romans killed him.
Where is the Roman Empire now?
Posted by: Reader C.J. Burch writes.... at December 30, 2010 09:56 AM (sJTmU)
Posted by: Buffalobob at December 30, 2010 09:56 AM (GwH6h)
Posted by: Jean at December 30, 2010 09:57 AM (judfL)
The Romans killed Jesus. The execution had to happen under Roman authority. Yes SOME of the Pharisees wanted Jesus out of the way, but the Romans killed him.
Where is the Roman Empire now?
Posted by: Reader C.J. Burch writes.... at December 30, 2010 01:56 PM (sJTmU)
Pretty sure I read the book of Matthew and actually understood it. Pilate didn't give a hoot about what the jews wanted, so he turned it over to them.
Posted by: tangonine at December 30, 2010 10:04 AM (x3YFz)
Posted by: Jean at December 30, 2010 10:06 AM (HKVGZ)
Posted by: Asscrackerton at December 30, 2010 10:14 AM (0ba8c)
Posted by: Velvet Ambition at December 30, 2010 10:18 AM (CcqND)
Jean-
One of the Michaels (Totten or Yon) had a nice series of dispatches on Lebanese politics. A Gordian knot doesn't begin to do it justice. I doubt even the players know which side they're on.
Posted by: pep at December 30, 2010 10:19 AM (3ll0O)
Posted by: Jeff at December 30, 2010 10:31 AM (A3tpD)
Comedy gold , baby .
Posted by: awkward davies at December 30, 2010 10:33 AM (YCW1b)
Posted by: garrett at December 30, 2010 10:42 AM (TZh2P)
Posted by: davidingeorgia at December 30, 2010 10:44 AM (02KaY)
Nice. Today's AoS referential meme award goes to garrett.
Posted by: toby928™ at December 30, 2010 10:44 AM (S5YRY)
Wait a minute....a massive blizzard hitting the East Coast....Britain glaciating in the coldest winter in a millenium....thereby the AGW movement becoming an international joke...oil prices spiking...and then, the Israelis find a massive LNG field off their shores?
There must be something to those Torah codes.
Posted by: Big Fat Meanie at December 30, 2010 10:46 AM (3iMgs)
Maybe but it's not like this is the first time people have said this about her. And not staffers for Joe Biden but people who worked for and supported her have said more than once there were issues with the finances of her campaigns.
It's not like this is out of the blue or beyond the realm of the possible, is it?
Posted by: DrewM. at December 30, 2010 10:50 AM (HicGG)
I can't wait to see how Obama tries to screw this up for them.
One concern, it won't take much of a terrorist attack to make a big bonfire, but at least it will burn clean.
Posted by: Hrothgar at December 30, 2010 10:55 AM (8nf3A)
I feel like my work in the headlines section goes unnoticed.
sniff.
Posted by: Ben at December 30, 2010 01:42 PM (wuv1c)
I noticed it, and it pissed me off, too... but we kind of knew the NYT had jack-all to do with actual *news* and was just a place for rich leftists to reinforce their own delusions of adequacy.
Too bad every newsroom in the country still gets a copy of this treacherous rag.
Posted by: Merovign, Strong on His Mountain at December 30, 2010 10:55 AM (bxiXv)
No, but I have become totally cynical about all these stories. I mean, it's quite possible that she is in technical violation of some law, or regulation, or guideline or whim of the authorities. But pretty much every campaign is. And to puff it like this, when there may not even be an actual investigation is, well, kind of like that BS Kirk story the other day about a letter he wrote in September of 2009.
The MFM lies. It's what they do.
Posted by: toby928™ at December 30, 2010 10:56 AM (S5YRY)
Shit, and I responded on the wrong thread.
I'm double denounced.
Posted by: toby928™ at December 30, 2010 10:57 AM (S5YRY)
It hurt just to read a couple of pages of the anti-everything ranting and looney-tunes alternative history.
Why oh why did we have to close the public mental hospitals!?!? I mean, sure they were horror chambers, but they kept these people off the interwebs!
Also, the interwebs did not exist so much back then, but DETAILS!
Posted by: Merovign, Strong on His Mountain at December 30, 2010 11:03 AM (bxiXv)
Only one thing could make this story perfect: the simultaneous announcement that the oil exploration companies miscalculated, and the Muslims (Arabs and Iranians) will run out of oil and natural gas next year.
That would be perfect.
Posted by: Jay Guevara at December 30, 2010 11:15 AM (m+Utx)
Posted by: t-bird at December 30, 2010 11:21 AM (kho+0)
Posted by: BigGator5 at December 30, 2010 11:24 AM (XQgW6)
In my current condition, I would be most happy to be a sail for one of those boats
Posted by: Rachel Corrie at December 30, 2010 11:59 AM (vdfwz)
Posted by: Jimmy Carter at December 30, 2010 12:25 PM (aWrFJ)
Yeah, first thing that crossed my mind, Obama browbeating with his moral authority. If we can do without and forfeit our fields to foreign industry, you must as well.
Posted by: maverick muse at December 30, 2010 01:36 PM (H+LJc)
Posted by: apodoca at December 30, 2010 04:16 PM (JCHdz)
Wong goblog
Asuhan Keperawatan
ngekngok
Song Lyric
badboybaik
Posted by: ngekngok at December 31, 2010 07:24 AM (K///b)
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Posted by: ersta mahnn at December 30, 2010 09:35 AM (S5YRY)