Air America Radio

Laura Flanders of Air America Radio will cover the NYT article on peak oil sometime during her radio show tonight.

Watch how no nationally syndicated right-wing radio hosts will touch this subject over the next few days. Mark my words.

(And of course, you will likely have to wade through listening to the Cindy Sheehan stories on AAR. I for one do not mind because you can connect the dots between all the stories.)

Archives at Air America Place within the next day or so.

Update: That show turned out as a bust. Although she pushed peak oil up front, It looks like she ran out of time dealing with other BushCo lunacies that have popped up recently.

However, the Freakonomics guys have jumped on the NYT piece with gusto.

So why do I compare peak oil to shark attacks? It is because shark attacks mostly stay about constant, but fear of them goes up sharply when the media decides to report on them. The same thing, I bet, will now happen with peak oil. I expect tons of copycat journalism stoking the fears of consumers about oil induced catastrophe, even though nothing fundamental has changed in the oil outlook in the last decade.

I posted this in their comments section:

I am very disappointed with Steve Levitt in his analysis. I thought Freakonomics was all about looking at the statistics and basic math underlying a premise and trying to debunk or support that premise. Many times you (Levitt) have been able to do this in your book by demonstrating how that almost certain correlations between cause and effect were simply anomalies that could not overcome the null hypothesis.

But now with this quickie study, you say " I don't know much about world oil reserves." So, with that, how can you say anything, one way or another, on how things will turn out?

Cripes, in the whole post, you didn't even mention that the USA has gone through its own peak oil in the 70's and you could have started one of your classic Freakonomics statistical studies from that well-understood set of data.

Actually I am not sure where you are going with this. I realize that you tend to take a balanced view of things, hitting progressive and conservative mistakes with equivalent gusto. With this, it seems you clearly do not want to upset the conservative circle.

Actually, I meant circle(jerk).

So I have finally determined that this Freakonomics guy basically works as a charlatan. At one time, I actually looked forward to what his blog had to offer. In the meantime, he has obtained airtime on many of the right-wing nutjob radio stations to sell his book by saying to the effect, "Hey look, see how fair-and-balanced I am, I go after faulty progressive issues." Well, in this one area he has just made a huge Freakonomical mistake. My Freakonomics analysis: The guy basically just wants to sell books and if he doesn't do a John Stoessel impersonation, he knows he will lose half his book-buying audience.

Too bad. Someone ought to tell him that those neanderthals don't buy books.

---

In another charlatan economist sighting, I overheard an economics professor named King Banaian (from the glorified beautician-school St.Cloud State University) state the following about the high-tech AI field called data mining. This on the local Patriot radio station and their Captain Ed skippered PowerBoat trolling Line blog show.

(paraphrasing) As an economist, I do a lot of data analysis... Data mining in academic circles has a very negative connotation... It is often referred to as doing a fishing expedition.

What a nob. Wait until data mining extracts a potential cure for avian flu, SARS, or some other disease from our great ecological database. Or when data mining finds the right DNA fragments to piece together the mysteries of various forms of cancer. In other words, unless you try wetting a line and engage in a fishing expedition, you won't catch anything. I can't wait until I hear the negative connotations over the next Nobel Prize-winning discovery obtained via data mining.