Hoping for the best!

Good Luck!

Keep your head up, the right fit will come.  My husband was out of work for 6 months, and he had a master’s.  We had to move from FL to CT for him to find a job.  But he found one with a company he really likes, even if they don’t pay as much as they should.

Q’plah!

(ok it’s klingon not vulcan so sue me)

Eighty-five percent qualified?  Shoot, you’re way more qualified for that job than I am for the one I’ve been doing for five years.  Good luck!

Best of luck with the jobs!

I’m starting to wonder how many people will have jobs a year from now. I’ve been following the Peak Oil news from dozens of sources (Such as the Association for the Study of Peak Oil&Gas) and the outlook is ugly to say the least. Here’s the latest article I read today.
--------------------------------------------------

RITA:
Storm May Be the Coup de Grace for the American Economy and Many of Us As Well

by
Michael C. Ruppert

© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, http://www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

September 21st, 2005 1530 PST (FTW) – As I pack my bags to head to Washington for Congressional Black Caucus hearings on the September 11th attacks (to be conducted this Friday and Saturday) my inbox is being progressively flooded with emails from inside sources in the energy industry about what Hurricane Rita is now likely to accomplish – the near-complete destruction of an already teetering US economy.

Fully 30% of all US refining capacity is in the target zone. Perhaps most importantly, almost every refinery capable of producing diesel fuel is in immediate danger. This promises (especially in the wake of Katrina) a devastating and irreplaceable shortage of the diesel fuel needed to power America’s harvest of grain and food crops this month and next. Without diesel fuel to power the harvesters and combines, crops may be left to rot in the ground presenting a double whammy: food shortages (with prices that may treble or quadruple) and export defaults negatively impacting the financial markets and trade deficit.

Even before Rita strikes, fully 30% of all domestic natural gas production is shut in. The US cannot import natural gas from overseas like it can both crude and refined products. Repair work on infrastructure damaged by Katrina has been halted as crews have been evacuated. The remaining half of Gulf energy production undamaged by Katrina is directly in Rita’s crosshairs. Natural gas prices are up over 110% and home heating oil futures are up almost 70% before Rita even gets here. Since Katrina, US domestic oil production is down one million barrels per day (from 5Mbpd to 4 Mbpd). We were producing 9 Mbpd less than a decade ago.

Peak Oil has made replacement of losses almost impossible even as Saudi heavy-sour is being spurned as useless around the world, even with discounts of up to $10 and $12 per barrel.

A Bloomberg article today contains a quotation from a Wall Street energy expert as saying, “‘Rita is developing into our worst-case scenario,’ said John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at Fimat USA in New York. ‘This is headed right into our other major refining center just after all the damage done to facilities in Louisiana. From an energy perspective it doesn’t get any worse than this.’â€?

The Chairman of Valero Energy agrees with the Bloomberg assessment calling Rita a potentially national disaster. His opinion is important because Valero operates more refineries in the US than any other company.

CNN is now predicting $5 per gallon gasoline and this will not likely go away with market manipulations. We had not yet experienced the permanent spikes resulting from Katrina, and the emergency reserves of the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the International Energy Agency have already been tapped once and not refilled.

The South Texas Project nuclear plant – one of the largest in the country – is being completely shut down in preparation for Rita’s landfall. It is only 12 miles from the Texas coast and almost dead center in the hurricane’s projected path. Texas has its own power grid but catastrophic electricity shortages could easily ripple throughout the country in a short time. Electricity lost from that that facility will only be added to what is lost from other facilities powered by now critically short supplies of natural gas.

For those of you who expect FEMA to behave any differently in Texas than it did in New Orleans you are in for a crude awakening. FEMA will do what it must now do to preserve even a functioning part of America’s governing and economic infrastructure. Saving lives will be one of the least important functions in its mandate. While I had serious doubts about America’s ability to recover from Katrina, I am certain that – barring divine intervention – the United States is finished; not only as a superpower, but possibly even as a single, unified nation with the arrival of Hurricane Rita.

You certainly seem to have a talent for finding the worst of the doom and gloom reports, Mayo.

Again, I’m skeptical that things will turn out as bad as this prediction. Not that it’s impossible, but it does seem more than a little alarmist. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough, though.

The rising price of oil is only a bad thing if you are a consumer that has no alternative.  Oh yeah we are.

People will only be pushed so far.  Necessity will lead to invention.  I can see a boom of industry based on alternatives to the high fuel prices now that we have topped the magic $70 per barrel.  (The price where even inefficient solar collectors can produce the same amount of energy ).

I am not an optimist, but I am practical.

No alternative?!  How about next time Americans go to the car dealer, they look at cars instead of luxury tricked out trucks ("SUV’s")?  How about when we go to the store to buy appliances we get the ones with better energy efficiency?  Or when we have that furnace replaced, get the super-efficient model?  How about when we buy a house, we take fuel costs into account in deciding the radius from work?  Or start riding the busses to work and pressing for more of them with better scheduling?

We have lots of good choices; we simply have not been making them.

Congratulations and good luck, Les.

ACK!  Sorry DOF.  Just sounds like corporate consumer propiganda.  It’s not the bad coporations that pollute it’s the consumers who buy the products right?  Very effective add campaign by big polluters.

As far as “BIG SUV”.  With the amount of materials, pollution, and waste that went into building the vehicle I bought used I can spend a lifetime and not come close to the amount of environmental damage, waste, or inefficiency.  This again is coporate propiganda. 

It may be hard to follow, but throwing away that “inefficient” appliance just to buy a “new” more efficient one, you may have made the manufacturer happy, but you have wasted more energy, resources, and effort than it would take to mantain the inefficient model.  Don’t be swayed by marketing. . .

It may be hard to follow, but throwing away that “inefficient� appliance just to buy a “new� more efficient one, you may have made the manufacturer happy,

So Bruno… you, uh, didn’t read my comment very carefully, eh?

People do buy new cars or your used cars would not exist.  As for adding up energy savings from better consumer choices, all I can say to you is, “do the math.” A GMC Denali gets about 12mpg.  Toyota Corolla, about 30mpg and a lot less steel (with its associated manufacturing use of energy, etc.) Most of the time, either car has one person in it. Other consumer products make similar differences.