So, who wants to drill more?

Seriously, how can anyone still want to keep on with off-shore drilling. The US Gulf wetlands are facing the prospect of being irreparably damaged for a generation, if not more. The machinery to get the oil out is ridiculously complicated and difficult to install.... It's a wonder that disasters like BP's haven't occurred more often, or been equally catastrophic.

An oil rig, the helicopters to service it, and the ships to drill and transport petroleum to the coast all together cost 100's of millions of dollars - and that's just the initial fixed cost to get the thing up... Never mind the net present value of wages, maintenance, and operational costs for the lifetime of the investment... If just a fraction of that were deferred, to say, a venture fund that focused on clean energy start-ups, we might even find a couple of real solutions. Hopefully Better Place and the Nissan Leaf will catch on in a big way, soon.

Leave it to Thomas Friedman

Leave it to Thomas Friedman to sum up the current state of the economy and our prospects for recovery in one sentence (from today's column):

"We have woven such a tangled financial mess with subprime mortgages wrapped in complex bonds and derivatives, pumped up with leverage, and then globalized to the far corners of the earth that, much as we want to think this will soon be over, that is highly unlikely."

- Thomas Friedman, 2/1/09

Great breakdown of the current economic situation

Here's a great snapshot of what the financial crisis has morphed into by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.

What a meeting of the minds

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for this meeting. Getting all of the living U.S. Presidents together... apparently it hadn't happened since 1981.

I think it's going to take a lot of strong creative and analytic thinking to solve the issues we face. I think it's a sign of strength for the new administration to be open to other ideas, but still have the grit to go ahead and do what it thinks is best.

Another Perspective on today's Dow Action

Interesting article by Time magazine saying that even though the economic crisis is bad, the US is getting off pretty lightly.

A Hearty Welcome to The Land of Doom and Gloom

We set out on Friday night to Iceland. The trip wasn't that bad - only about 4.5 hours to get in. After making some party supply stops at the Duty Free, we were on a bus headed to Reykjavic by 7 AM in the morning or so.

We hit rush hour traffic, got to our hotel which is amazing, and then headed on a city tour. After viewing several areas that we cared about, and others that we didn't (like the Icelandic projects), we were introduced to the fatalism currently existing here. Although we knew how bad the economic situation is, the tour guide kept on highlighting the doom and gloom in everything we saw - building projects that no one knows when they'll be restarted, an exodus of foreign migrant workers, the fact that the usually lively streets were empty because no one wanted to walk around... This is ground zero for the credit crisis.

After all the gloomy discussion, we headed back to the hotel for a nap.