Beware the $30 oil

A Financial Post article in today's paper says that oil could drop as low as $30 a barrel in 2007 and that it very well may hover around $40 for most of the calendar year. Further the firm speculates that oil wont return to its August high of $77 until the end of the decade.

This is bad bad news for us Petroleum Engineers trying to find jobs. A lot of the job growth has been in the oilsands where projects will become uneconomical. The personnel working on these jobs may very well move back to more conventional projects where many of us were set to find jobs.

Now predicting oil prices is about as accurate, as say, predicting the weather or climate change, but even the speculation of weak oil prices may be enough for companies to slash entry positions and salaries for the positions that remain.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling!

See full article: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=07c20ef4-65c2-433e-99ab-bc7ad1b771fc&k=13585

My Favourite Super Bowl Commercials

Well the lastest Superbowl has come and gone and with it a new crop of infamous Super Bowl Ads. I am sure by now everyone has had time to hit the internet and see the latest but if you haven't then you can find them all here http://www.ifilm.com/superbowl.

Chevy put a whole swack of ads together and I would say by and large they were ok. The only that stood out for me was the GM one with the robot who day dreams what its life would be like if it screwed up and got fired but i think it was supposed to be a funny ad it was really just kind of sad.



A bunch of companies had ads for black history month which I guess is important in the states but they just seemed boring to me. Maybe I am just being insensitive? Sierra Mist had some interesting ads including the beard combover. Everyone was talking about the Snickers kiss the next day and while both this and the Sierra Mist ads got a cheap laugh they weren't classics by any means. Coke plugged a couple of computer generated ads but both ads have already been playing before movies and they are probably more suited to that kind of atmosphere. Ford, Toyoto and Lexus rolled out intriguing ads with Ford showing all of the thousands of truck components coming together and Toyoto stopping its truck just before it falls off a cliff, and Lexus having its car race a car dropped from a helicopter to show that its so fast it can beat gravity. All three were kinda cool and geared to the right audience but failed to make my list of the best.

My favourite ads came from some likely places with Bud Light and Fed-Ex making the cut as well as a couple different ads from Nationwide and Sprint that I really enjoyed. So here are my top 5 favourite ads from Super Bowl XLI.

Number 5: Sprint - Connectile Dysfunction
This ad parodies erectile dysfunction to a T. I love parodies.



Number 4: FedEx - Don't Judge
FedEx always has a good ad every year and this one is definitely water-cooler talk worthy.



Number 3: Bud Light - Auctioneer's Wedding
An auctioneer helps the grooms men get to the Bud faster. Ingenious!



Number 2: Nationwide - K-Fed Rollin' VIP
Excellent ad with K-Fed poking fun at himself. I can't believe the union of bugger flippers (see people with an Arts degree) are suing Nationwide for this one.



Number 1: Bud Light - Slapping
God I hope this doesn't catch on. Destined to be another classic.

Harper's Mini Throne Speech

For the complete news article: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070205/harper_speech_070206/20070206?hub=TopStories

In what is being called his "mini throne speech" Harper has promised to cap total emissions.

This is a huge reversal of previous policy, and it is a very bad decision. Is climate change a reality? Yes. Is it in part human caused? Yes. There is no reason to try and cap emissions immediately though. We should be focusing our emission reduction efforts on using best practices such that emissions per barrel of oil produced, or emissions per kilowatt hour of electricity produced are minimal. We should not however, effectively cap the total production of oil or electricity to cut emissions.

If the Government wants to further cut emissions they should turn to individuals to cut consumption rather than punishing the resource industries that are fuelling the Canada economy (literally). The best way to get citizens to cut consumption is through tax incentives for reducing consumption or for buying energy efficient appliances. On the transportation side implementing more car pool lanes, making public transit a more viable option by increasing it's efficiency or what about a tax credit for buying low-emission vehicles? These are all far better options than potentially stagnating the economy by capping total industrial emissions produced by the very industries that are providing the only economic growth.

I have worked on the two previous Conservative campaigns and will do so in the soon to be upcoming one, but this is one area that I have to disagree with Harper on. That said, the Liberals under the insufferable Stephane Dione still hawking the horrid Kyoto Protocol. It is almost unbelievable that anyone still thinks that Kyoto is a viable plan to tackle green house gas emissions. Or actually that the Kyoto Protocol is about tackling green house gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol was all about Canada getting screwed in negotiations and still going along with a Euro-centric international agreement designed to look like France and Germany were getting tough on the environment. Reality check; for Canada Kyoto means donating 9 billion a year to the Russians. Thanks, but no thanks Dion. Let's keep that money in Canada and tackle the problem domestically.

The rest of the "mini throne" speech went better however with Harper reiterating common sense policies to democratize the presently useless Senate, a more assertive foreign policy, addressing the fiscal imbalance and more open federalism. Still this environment gambit looks ill advised and will in my opinion do little to sway "green" voters to the Conservative Party.