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The Abundance Illusion

carlyle.com

21–30 of 46 posts

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#21
Some have touted the U.S. as having achieved "energy independence" because of its status as net exporter of oil. This is premature. The U.S. is marginally a net exporter. However, it still imports a lot of oil. It just exports slightly more than it imports.

So, if the world markets gets too dicey, it'd be easy to just cut off the export taps and keep all that oil for Americans, right? Not so fast! First, it's the wrong types of oil in the wrong places. The U.S. doesn't have the infrastructure to transport that domestic oil to where it needs to be, nor the refining capacity to handle it. There's also the pesky issue of enforcing export bans and lower domestic pricing of oil. Go look up Canada's "National Energy Program" from the 80's to see what sort of things might come with that strategy.

If world oil markets go nuts, the U.S. is still very exposed. Putting up a wall would require pipelines and refineries that would take decades to build and policies that could tear apart the country. Americans have a president who is both committed to destabilizing world oil markets and opposing electrification that might reduce the impact of that instability. That's a dangerous combination.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#22
post #17
post #9

'Figure 2: US energy exports outpace production' We're producing 14,000,000 barrels of oil per day and exporting about 6,000,000 per day, but the author used a graph with two different y-axis scales to make the lines cross so it looks like more oil is being exported than produced.

Wow, that’s an egregious chart crime. Surely there’s a way to make a chart that isn’t so dishonest. Just plotting the SPR level would make the same point honestly.

| Just plotting the SPR level would make the same point honestly.

They'd still have to zoom in a lot.

Here's the SPR level since the 80s: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W... The big drop around 2022 is, supposedly, related to the Ukraine war.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#23
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to top it off both Y axes have the exact same label. The graph has no indication as to which line belongs to which axis. Of course, we can easily infer which is which from the surrounding article, but still... terrible data visualization

I thought the same thing about matching the line to the axis, but the legend is marked with LHS and RHS. It's very subtle.

Ah, missed that. Well, I think the point remains that it's an abominable and misleading graph

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#24
post #6

> The hard work Carter asked for — building the physical capacity to never need the buffer — was quietly abandoned. But since then, US natural gas production doubled [1], and solar power is growing exponentially [2]. Leaving that out of the history seems excessively gloomy. [1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9050us2a.htm [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183447/us-energy-generat...

If you look at US share of energy consumption by source you can see that solar is 2.83% of energy used in the US. Natural gas is 34.2% .

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#25
post #12
post #8

61% AI generated, according to Pangram https://www.pangram.com/history/e5a00ace-94cc-436e-b87b-a094... c'mon, you're Carlyle, a trusted institution for financial advice! How can I trust what you're saying if the AI-generated text is so blatantly obvious?

Is there any reason to trust Pangram's tool over Carlyle's reputation? I don't know whether this was AI generated or not, but an online tool claiming it's AI generated doesn't sway my opinion much. Are there any studies showing that Pangram's tool is well calibrated for this type of article? If not, what makes you trust it? (I'm not sure why it was marked that way, but I vouched to bring your comment back from auto-d…

> Is there any reason to trust Pangram's tool over Carlyle's reputation?

You have your own chatbot, right? Ask it. I've never had one disagree with GPTZero yet.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#26
post #24
post #6

> The hard work Carter asked for — building the physical capacity to never need the buffer — was quietly abandoned. But since then, US natural gas production doubled [1], and solar power is growing exponentially [2]. Leaving that out of the history seems excessively gloomy. [1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9050us2a.htm [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183447/us-energy-generat...

If you look at US share of energy consumption by source you can see that solar is 2.83% of energy used in the US. Natural gas is 34.2% . https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

That's a really interesting/informative link you have.

Some highlights are:

- Energy use per capita has been declining since 2000

- Overall energy use has been basically flat since 2000

- Essentially, coal is being replaced by gas, almost 1:1. Lump both together and their relative share of the market is pretty stable.

- Solar went from 0.3 to 2.8% in the last 10 years, wind from 0.3% to 4.2% in the last 20 years. 7% wind/solar isn't world-leading but getting from basically 0 to 7% in 20 years is significant movement.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#28
post #8

61% AI generated, according to Pangram https://www.pangram.com/history/e5a00ace-94cc-436e-b87b-a094... c'mon, you're Carlyle, a trusted institution for financial advice! How can I trust what you're saying if the AI-generated text is so blatantly obvious?

I do not understand why this matters. Judge the content on its merit. It makes no difference if “AI wrote it”.

Re: The Abundance Illusion

#29
post #20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason to trust Pangram's tool over Carlyle's reputation? I don't know whether this was AI generated or not, but an online tool claiming it's AI generated doesn't sway my opinion much. Are there any studies showing that Pangram's tool is well calibrated for this type of article? If not, what makes you trust it? (I'm not sure why it was marked that way, but I vouched to bring your comment back from auto-d…

Yes there are studies, for example last year Pangram's false positives were measured to be under 0.5%. https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals Personally, at first I thought these sorts of tools were dumb and wouldn't really work, but I think it works because it just isn't designed to be "adversarial". If you want your AI to trick Pangram, you can make an AI to trick Pangram. It just catches people who…

Any binary classifier can have a FPR under 0.5% if you don't have any restriction on FNR...
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