Terry Etam

As a youth, I, like most others, did my best to drive my parents crazy by spending my time reading magazines as opposed to anything they might have considered worthwhile. I knew nothing about any historical events before the most recent Tuesday, but I could tell you anything about fast cars. To this day I remember little about high school biology but I do remember quite clearly a review of a Porsche 911 from the early 1980s. I can see the pictures and stats page in my mind, and I can remember [Read more]

Picking on governments is an easy sport. It’s not hard to find dumb policies or some initiative that goes against an ideological viewpoint and infuriates exactly 40 percent of any given population. Instead of getting bogged down in provincial matters (both literally and legislatively provincial), I encourage you to expand your ire to the bigger picture where truly serious damage is happening. Current global policies are impacting not only energy but the whole economic framework. I’m not [Read more]

I’ve often felt bad for being amused by the antics of demented government regimes, such as how the Soviet Union officially described the Berlin Wall as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, or how North Korea refers to itself as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. To anyone outside the system there is a delightful and almost endearing absurdity in these child-like attempts to disguise the true nature of their actions. But behind the comedy was always the realization that real people were [Read more]

Out there in the cloud, somewhere in the e-bowels of an upstanding company’s financial reporting cesspool, is a curious commentary about future decommissioning liabilities. Under a "Provisions" subsection, this pipeline company’s annual report discloses that a provision for future liabilities must be recognized when, among other things, “the obligation can be reliably estimated.” That is the standard as set down by auditors, and the section drones about the process until the punch line where it [Read more]

Before getting to energy stuff, several interesting government schemes have developed over the past decade. One particularly noteworthy grew out of the financial crisis like a Harry Potter-world beast. This thing is real though, and worthy of some considerable attention. First, here’s a precursor to illustrate a point. A pillar of the modern financial world is credit rating agencies. These firms are, in theory and purpose, very simple machines. They act as impartial judges in assessing [Read more]