Wide Boundary News: Sacrificing Wilderness, Oil Data Propaganda, and Feeding the Superorganism's Brain

[upbeat music] Number one, the US Department of Energy last week put out new promotional educational materials announcing what they're calling the golden era of energy dominance.

Big charts, the word Trump printed inside the chart's bars, and the headline claim is that the United States now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined.

That claim is technically accurate, but also misleading depending on how you count.

And the Department of Energy's spin on the information is, in my opinion, uh, not so dissimilar than propaganda.

The USA production number bundles in crude oil, natural gas, plant liquids, biofuels, and refinery processing gain.

The Saudi and Russia numbers in comparison are typically at a narrower crude-only basis, which is the higher quality energy stuff.

So the chart technically isn't fabricating anything, but is quite the selection bias, which is exactly how data integrity erodes over time.

Digging deeper into this data in a narrow boundary sense and what is reported in the news a lot of late is the US is a net oil exporter, uh, but this is technically false.

We are a net product exporter, and much of the product is natural gas liquids, typically called NGL, which result in products like baggies that we put our sandwiches in, not gasoline or diesel products.

In the past two years, the USA average importing over six million barrels a day of oil, and we exported around four million barrels.

Uh, we're producing around thirteen, and our total consumption is around twenty.

So the wide boundary statement here is we are both an importer and an exporter of complexity, which is fraught with risk.

Um, and stay tuned for what will be next week's episode with Art Berman to unpack this.

Of course, petrostates have always had reasons to massage the truth.

OPEC countries famously revised their reserve numbers upward in the nineteen eighties when the quota system started rewarding bigger paper reserves.

The Soviet Union published overly cheerful production data for decades.

But here's the wider boundary view.

We are somewhere near the top of the carbon pulse, give or take.

Navigating the next twenty or thirty years is going to require honest data about where we are actually on that curve and many other things.

This means clarity and honesty and integrity about reserves and decline rates, the energy needed to get energy out, and the gap between what we're pumping and what we're claiming we can pump.

And if the data feeds become politically, um, useful branding tools, what happens to the analysts like me and the public that depend on them? The Energy Information Administration is still one of the few global sources trying to do honest accounting, and private analysts already pay for the proprietary databases the public can't see.

So for everyone else, the picture is going to get increasingly fuzzier.

So here's an uncomfortable question.

Is it possible or even likely that we someday pass the peak of the carbon pulse, but never quite know because the data is either privatized or skewed and the people who could push back have lost access to the actual underlying numbers? How much of our future depends on being told the truth about where we are on these curves, and who exactly, uh, is in charge of telling it? I suppose even a wider angle, uh, question, how much of our future depends on being told the truth, full stop? Okay, point number two, um, for today, I wanna talk about Iran.