WTI Slips Below $53 -- January 27, 2020

Active rigs:

$52.98	1/27/2020	01/27/2019	01/27/2018	01/27/2017	01/27/2016
Active Rigs	55	65	57	38	47

No new permits today.

No permits canceled.

No permits renewed.

No producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed.

No runs, no hits, no errors. 

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, career, travel, job, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

Hedging: it should be noted that how oil companies hedge their contracts, the sudden drop in oil prices could benefit some oil companies, at least on paper, for the immediate short term. However, overall, I don't think anyone bullish on oil would be happy with price of oil right now.

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The Book Page

 

Updates

Can you spot the "Sixth Extinction"? Link here.

 

The Original Post

Now that I'm reading John Hands' Cosmo Sapiens again, c. 2015, it is fun to go back and read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Actually I've never read the entire book but I've seen the title often and have often paged through it while standing in Barnes and Noble. I couldn't imagine spending that much time reading one book with such a title but a "reader's digest" version would be welcome. It turns out there is, over at The New Yorker, May 18, 2009. Archived.

Kolbert's essay addresses early on the "fallacy" of her own title, the sixth extinction. In fact, there have been at least twenty global extinctions, but five were particularly huge, and so, for marketing, no doubt, this book was titled the "Sixth Extinction."

Depending upon how this all turns out, there is a question whether this "sixth extinction" will even be ranked among the top twenty, much less the top ten. And I guess it's agreed that it won't make the top five. I guess is if we don't kill off all the cockroaches, we won't see another global extinction make the top five. But I digress.

Reading the "reader's digest" version at The New Yorker suggests my initial hunches were correct. The sixth extinction had mostly to do with amphibians and buried deep in the article:

But, as the number of examples [of disappearing amphibians] increased, the evidence only seemed to grow more confounding. Though amphibians in some remote and—relatively speaking—pristine spots seemed to be collapsing, those in other, more obviously disturbed habitats seemed to be doing fine. Meanwhile, in many parts of the world there weren’t good data on amphibian populations to begin with, so it was hard to determine what represented terminal descent and what might be just a temporary dip.

I've never gotten too excited about the link between man and the potential extinction of amphibians. After all, as Kolbert herself noted:

The fifth [extinction] occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period, sixty-five million years ago. The end-Cretaceous event exterminated not just the dinosaurs but seventy-five per cent of all species on earth.

To the best of my knowledge, neither men in general nor one man in particular, Trump, had anything to do with the fifth extinction. And yet it occurred. Of the dinosaurs, only the birds survived. 

On another note: for me, amphibians have always been a transitional clade, one of two clades that solved the problem of preventing eggs from drying out for those adventurous animals that tried to move from the sea to the land. Amphibians never really pulled it off; they return to the "sea" to lay their egg; the amniotes succeeded where amphibians failed.

I'm always been more surprised by the fact that amphibians have survived this long, much less surprised that they might go extinct in the next several million years. With or without the help of man.

Along that same line, I always thought "reptiles" were a grab-bag of animals assigned to a clade (or better said, a grade) that really didn't fit anywhere else. The term "Reptilia" is falling out of favor to "Sauropsida" (wiki) and it appears Reptilia/Sauropsida are defined more by what they are not, than what they are. Despite their small number, it appears "Reptilia/Sauropsida" are gaining more "stature" among biologists, at least based on the amount of new information printed since I last studied them in high school.

From the internet/wiki: there are about 7,500 species of extant reptiles. There are approximately 8,000 species of amphibians, of which 90% are frogs.

From John Hands, page 279,

Estimates of the number of living eukaryotic species range from five million to 30 million, of which around two million have been described.
Only about 4,500 prokaryotic species (bacteria and archaea) have been described, but estimates of their total number in the top  one kilometer of the Earth's crust alone range from 10^8 to 10^17 (a hundred million to a hundred thousand trillion).

Mammals? 5,416 species.

And as long as I've gone this far, insects?

1.5 million beetle species and 5.5 million insect species, with about 1 million insect species currently found and described.

This is depressing.

Time for some music:

The Age of Aquarius, The Fifth Dimension   I've often wondered what the equivalent of the anaerobic St Greta of Thunberg would have "said" during the great oxidation event, also called the "oxygen holocaust," 2.4 billion years ago which not only caused almost all life on earth to go extinct but it happened relatively quickly, in the big scheme of things.

And Prince Charles is worried about a few inches in the rise of the Earth's oceans.