The Good, Bad, And The Ugly -- May 5, 2022

Yesterday I posted:

Perfect storm:

• energy transition is dead ("everybody" now realizes that)
  
• Putin's War: a lot of Russian oil is taken off the market 
• we have an administration in Washington (DC) that doesn't understand what's going on and will (purposely or inadvertently) do everything to kill the US oil industry
• this administration in place for three more years; three more years to exacerbate situation 
• windfall profits tax will exacerbate price of gasoline at the pump;
• US E&P under-capitalization (multiple reasons)
• financial institutions coordinated moving investments to non-fossil fuel companies
• capital being moved from fossil fuel to renewable energy, tech, healthcare
• fossil fuel out of favor with managed funds

Now, this, early today, link here:

Also, link here with Ronald McDonald:

Wow, let me repeat: we have an administration in Washington (DC) that doesn't understand what's going on and will (purposely or inadvertently) do everything to kill the US oil industry.

The key phrase today is obviously: we have an administration in Washington (DC) that doesn't understand what's going on.

They announced an SPR release when price was "relatively" low, and now announce they want to buy back what they released at a higher price. 

I would assume the only place the federal government can "store" newly bought oil is in the SPR.

To flip-flop so soon speaks volumes. 

The "good" ("best') interpretation: the administration knows oil is going higher and they want to buy back before it gets higher (the federal government is not into "trading" oil for profit, so this argument makes little sense).

The "bad" ("another") interpretation: the administration now knows that algorithms take into account declining inventories, and the price of oil will increase, all things being equal, if the computers / robots see declining inventories. Robots don't care about politics or what feels good. 

The "ugly" ("scariest) interpretation: the administration is looking at demand projections for the US driving season which begins in .... drum roll ... 26 days, and, looking at yesterday's EIA "gasoline demand" chart realize "we" are going to be really, really short of crude oil this summer. 

Gasoline demand was up and the API forecast a huge draw on oil and refined products and yet refiners were only operating at 88% of their operable capacity as they switch from winter to summer and to the new E15 waivers. Imagine what happens to commercial inventories of crude oil when refiners get back to their more normal 92% operating capacity and shale operators hold the line, not increasing production -- some because they have made that decision for financial and strategic reasons; others because they simply can't get the workers needed to complete drilled wells. 

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The Book Page

Two "entries" today.

"Don't fear a red planet: the story of the world's only native comic shop." The Nation.

On June 4, 2017, nearly 200 people descended on a quiet block in Albuquerque, N.M. 

While the Jir Project, a band from Cochiti Pueblo, played in the shade, visitors from across the state poured into Red Planet Books and Comics, which claims to be the only Native comic book store in the world. 

Outside, artists exhibited their work and signed books, and inside, comic fans browsed the graphic novels, children’s books, and nonfiction works—mostly by Indigenous creators. The store’s founder, Lee Francis IV, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, hadn’t expected such a turnout and said that he sold nearly all the books shop had. The warm, festival-like atmosphere and scores of fans had welcomed the bookstore to the community.

Since that day in 2017, Red Planet has sold graphic novels, comics, games, toys, and collectibles to “Indigenerds” in New Mexico. Situated a block south of Route 66, Red Planet’s mission is clear from its exterior. A mural designed to look like a comic book cover engulfs the shop’s facade: One side lists a price of “505 cents,” a reference to the city’s area code, and the other “Vol. 1680,” the year of the Pueblo Revolt. Red Planet’s mission to celebrate Native creators is even clearer on the inside: Illustrations of Star Wars and Marvel characters hang alongside paintings of Sitting Bull and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland; Dungeons & Dragons sets sit near Cards For Decolonization; and copies of classic comics like March and Persepolis are shelved alongside Native-authored books like Code Talkers and If I Go Missing.

As it approaches its fifth anniversary this June, Red Planet has grown into something more: a space for artists, writers, and fans to imagine Indigenous futures beyond the Southwest and the traditional comic book format.

The second entry: "How Texas was born of revolution and settler-colonialism." 

Spain’s North American colonial empire was in its death throes when the Cherokees crossed the Red River in 1819. For almost a decade, Mexico had been wracked by a bloody war for independence that was now grinding toward a conclusion. Home to no more than three thousand Hispanos, Texas had never occupied a significant place in Spain’s imperial project. Nonetheless, it was not spared the wrenching upheaval of revolution, and in recent years the area had devolved into virtual anarchy.

So feeble was Spain’s hold over the northern frontier that Texas had begun to attract the attention of American adventurers, who launched a number of filibustering expeditions into the province. At first, such enterprises were undertaken in cooperation with Mexican revolutionists. But as the War of Independence dragged on, American soldiers of fortune began to pursue an agenda all their own, with the goal of establishing an independent Texas that could one day be annexed by the United States.

Despite the political chaos, Texas remained, for all intents and purposes, a Native American world, inhabited by a constellation of peoples as culturally distinct as the region was vast. Bowls’s Cherokees were not the first refugee Indians from the United States to find a home in East Texas. For several years, this remote corner of New Spain had become a destination of choice for Native Americans displaced by white encroachment.

A few Western Cherokees received permission from Spanish officials to reside in East Texas as early as 1807. About the same time, small groups of Alabama, Coushatta, and Biloxi Indians from the Lower South crossed the Sabine River into Texas, to settle in the bayou country between the Trinity and Neches rivers. Still others, the Shawnees, Delawares, and Kickapoos, Algonquin-speaking peoples from the Ohio River Valley, drifted into East Texas after Tecumseh’s efforts to establish a pan-Indian alliance ended in failure during the War of 1812.

Indian tribes / nations / peoples mentioned in the article:

• Western Cherokees, 1807
• Alabama, Coushatta, and Biloxi -- from the Lower South crossed the Sabine River into Texas, to settle the bayou country between the Trinity and Neches rivers
• Shawnees, Delawares, and Kickapoos, Algonquin-speaking peoples from the Ohio River Valley drifted into East Texas after Tecumseh's efforts to establish a pan-Indian alliance ended in failure during the War of 1812
• already living in East Texas when the above started arriving: the Native peoples already living there:
• a flourishing confederacy that extended into northern Louisiana and Arkansas; known collectively as Caddos, the woodland tribes that had been decimated by European diseases (think smallpox); one or two thousand still remained, living in small villages between the Sabine and Trinity rivers
• seminomadic Wichitas, driven off the Low Plains by the Osage several decades earlier, occupied the prairies of northeast Texas, while some drifted farther south, into the central part of the province, establishing fortified towns along the Brazos and Navasota rivers
• nomadic triibes, the Comanches and Apaches, vied for control of buffalo grazing lands, having displaced Tonkawa bands that now roamed the post oak savannahs closer to the coast
• along the Gulf Coast, several hundred Kranakawas fished and hunged in area bays and waterways, rarely venturing more than afew miles infland
• Bowls's Cherokees: crossed the Red River, made their way south, to the headwaters of the Trinity near present-day Dallas
• there they clashed wiith the Taovaya Wichitas, heavily timbered bosd'arc tree, essential for making bows
• the Cherokees followed well-worn Caddo trails into the forests of East Texas. An immense wedge of timberland comprising roughly one-third of the province, the area was part of a great pine belt that spanned much of the American South, a humid region of slow-moving rivers, languid creeks, and stagnant bayous. Its gently undulating landscape flattened out as it stretched southward, the pine barrens giving way to the wetlands of the Gulf Coast. The Cherokees settled between the Neches and Angelina rivers, about a day’s ride north of the small Spanish town of Nacogdoches. The Caddo Indians resented the newcomers, but unlike the Osage and Wichitas lacked the numbers to expel them.