This is my least favorite season. What season is that you ask? Election season. As I’ve accumulated years on this earth I have come to loathe politics. When I was younger I eagerly engaged in debates and discussions about the issues of the day. I thought I was smart and well-read and had something to say. But I could never really shake my old man’s favorite line: “opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one.” Yeah, I know it was not HIS line, countless others have said it, but it fit my dad’s personality to a T. He had a boatload of opinions that he was happy to holler about and he was an asshole, to boot. I loved my father, but he really was a difficult sort.

Anyway, the longer I spent listening to people’s opinions the less I became interested. I’m happy you think cucumber-ginger ice cream is the greatest flavor on earth but I’ll stick with chocolate chip. I mean, really? Do I give a shit? No! And when I say I don’t give a shit that does not mean I disapprove. If you like that stuff, go for it. Just don’t shove it down my throat. In fact, I am cool with whatever floats your boat. I like happy people and if you want to do tae-bo at the crack of dawn with a gym full of other sweaty folks, more power to you. I’ll be sipping Peet’s and eating oatmeal because that’s how I roll.

Back to politics. Politics, for me, is intellectual death. The point of politics is to get votes. To get votes, you say what you think people want to hear. You keep it simple, and you lie if necessary, and it is almost always necessary to lie. Now I’ve got no beef with that. Really, lying is part of life. I’m a big boy. I accept that ugly fact. Advertising is lying and this country’s economy is built almost entirely upon advertising. Only a fool or a sociopath would look you in the eye and tell you with utmost certainty that his mass-produced take-out pizza is better than the other guy’s mass-produced take-out pizza.

That’s politics. Passing out the verbal equivalent of indistinguishable mass-produced take-out pizza slices. And claiming “mine tastes better, really!” I’m a good citizen. I obey the law, mostly, and stay out trouble. I don’t take what isn’t mine and I don’t mess with other people. I drive defensively and I use my turn signals. I pay my taxes and I vote. I don’t mind voting for “the lesser of two evils” and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I just don’t want to hear it anymore. I’m done. There’s nothing new, just the same old recycled jibber-jabber. My mind dies when I watch a political event, be it a speech, a convention, or a debate.

But this is the season. We get to elect a new El Presidente this November and by golly there’s a host o’folks chasing that dream. They are going to talk a lot and say very little. And all of us will line up this way or that, get in our tribes and holler and wave our banners, and try to stay friends through it all. But “messaging” hurts my brain. It’s bad for me. I don’t need and I don’t want “talking points.” I don’t see the world that way. I don’t think in “pro” and “con.” Those are just mental straitjackets. I see a continuum, colors that grade into each other like the spectrum, like a rainbow. I have a hard time with black and white despite my fondness for those kinds of movies.

I’m not a complete fool. I know some of those characters out there hoping to be POTUS are dangerous fuck-ups. I’m sure we could disagree readily on which ones. And one of them might win and fuck things up. I’m picking the one I think has the least chance of really blowing chow. I suppose a lot of the other voters think along the same lines. In the end, we’ll probably get someone not-too-great but not-too-horrible either and we’ll muddle along, much like before. I think we might be victims of our own expectations, that is, we hope for far more from our candidates than they can actually deliver.

I suppose I’m thankful for living in a democracy. Actually, it’s a republic, but we don’t seem to call it that nowadays. We get reminded all the time about the superiority of democracy but we forget that it’s a messy business. But, like taking out the garbage, I’m willing to do it. Taking out the garbage doesn’t kill brain cells, however. And if I want dead brain cells, I’ll whip up another cocktail.

Cheers!

It was Headbanger Heaven at our local watering hole last night. Metal music isn’t really my thing, but I knew a few of the youngsters performing so I figured I had to check them out. Four bands rocked the house for a few hours and I managed to sit at the bar and nurse a few brews while my senses were assaulted. Saw several friends, mostly former students, and got to see a real-live albeit miniature mosh pit. It’s been thirty-plus years since I was anywhere near a mosh pit and those were at punk shows in the Bay Area when I was a college kid. My ears are still ringing but that’s a common complaint for me, they ring most of the damn time. I should have brought ear plugs.

I don’t really like the throat cancer-growling that passes for vocals with these fellows but I do have to say they are mostly strong musicians and the guitarists could lay down some licks. The booming double-kick bass drumming seems to define the genre and you could feel those vibrations deep in the viscera. Speaking of genre, I don’t know if it’s hardcore, thrash, speed metal or what-have-you, I couldn’t tell the difference but I’m sure the lads would have told me if I’d asked.

What I liked the most was not the music so much, even though two of the bands were noticeably good, but the passionate fan base. People came out ready to party and have fun. Pints and shots, mostly Bud Light and tequila, flew across the bar and the crowd got good and drunk and hollered every time a singer dropped the f-bomb, which was a lot. The mood was upbeat and cheerful despite what seems to me somber and angry music. And getting intoxicated people all fired up seems like a good way to have bad things happen. I left at the end of the show so I can’t say if anything bad happened at the end of the night, but it was all good when I was there. Everyone was too busy enjoying themselves and cheering on their boys to have a problem. The headliner act is local and last night was the first date on their inaugural tour. The folks running the bar did a great job slaking the thirst of the army of metal-heads and the event went smoothly as the bands swapped out quickly and got to playing straight away.

I won’t be switching to black leather and boots any time soon. And I won’t speculate on the sociology of metal. People like it, I can tell you that. The performers were all serious about their craft and made the most of their stage time, giving it their all. Like I said it ain’t really my thing but I needed a dose of something new and original and it suited me just fine.

I read a blog called Wasatch Snow Forecast. Powderhounds who are meteorologists. Or meteorologists who are powderhounds. I don’t know. Might just be one guy. In fact, I think it is. So this Utah powderhound meteorologist writes about the Wasatch Range, weather, and powder skiing. Scientific, but personal, written by a serious enthusiast of both endeavors. And he likes to call the powder days. That is, predict the arrival of the snow as well as its quality, and about timing the skiing. Bluebird conditions, deep and soft, that sort of thing. This blog isn’t the only one devoted to Utah pow. There are others. But that’s not the point. The point is that WSF had this to say about our home:

The Pacific Northwest was a barren wasteland last year at this time.

So true!  But that’s not the point either. The point is that things are looking up. I’ve made seven trips to Mt. Ashland in the last two weeks and got five great skiing days out of those trips. I could have skied another five days but I was fussy and only went when there was fresh snow. But there are piles of the stuff up there. Enough so that there will be skiing for some time. I prefer to ski the freshly fallen stuff, the elusive pow-pow, so I’ll be awaiting more storms. After this weekend the schoolkids will be back in school and their parents will be back at work so the slopes will have fewer folks. But the fact that so much has come already is the real good news. Here’s a visual:

Purple is good.

We look good.

Let’s hope it continues.

Happy New Year!

The storms came and the snow fell and the mountain was covered. So covered, in fact, that they could not open due to a power outage and a nearly-impassable road. But open, eventually, they did. This past Monday Mount Ashland ran one—just one—chairlift and skiers from all over thronged to the gates. The snow was deep and fluffy and was cut up in a hurry by the skiing-starved hordes. My buddy and I managed to find some good stuff. It was hard going for me at first as it always takes me a while to find my legs. The surface was soft and ski-able but inconsistent and well-churned. As the day progressed I managed to find a rhythm and got in some good sequences. The last run was a trip to The Void where it was waist-deep. I got stuck at the top in a quicksand-like patch but dug myself out for what was almost a swim down the steep pitch to just above the parking lot. I missed the spot I wanted and had to traverse over a vertical stretch before finding an outlet. Two quick turns on the steep wall and I slid down to the snow-covered pavement and skied it back to my truck. Glorious!

We are going to take another stab at it tomorrow morning. Maybe this winter will finally give us the ski season we’ve been waiting for. And perhaps the snows will finally give us all some relief from the drought. Nature is a harsh mistress. No guarantees. But a good start, to be sure.

Here’s a link to the webcam on Mt. A. Nice, huh?

That’s not a snow report, that’s a dull blade shoved in deep. Mt. Ashland has a veneer of snow on her slopes, nothing more. At least two feet of the white stuff, preferably three, is required for skiing. Another winter is upon us and although it is early things are once again starting slowly. Too slowly for my taste. Last year was a disaster and that followed a year that was actually worse. If good things come in threes, what do bad things come in?

I love winter. I love cold weather. Jackets, hats, gloves, scarves, thick socks—these are the things that make me happy. Piles of snow make me even happier. It’s been plenty cold here in the State of Jefferson but there’s certainly not been enough moisture in the air. On our drive south last week we drove over Black Butte Summit in the snow. We followed the plows on the interstate as they scraped the measly few inches off the blacktop in front of us. Since then? Nothing. Bupkes. Nada. Oh, the forecast says we’ll get a drop or two later this week but nothing to get excited about.

In California we talk about drought all the time. That’s because it doesn’t rain at all for half the year. Just about all the precipitation that will fall in the state will fall between November and April. From May to October we are mostly dry. And half the damn state is desert or damn close. I tell people we will always have drought. We will always demand more water for whatever purposes we want it for and our demand will always exceed our supply. But it can be better some years and worse in others and that is mostly due to snowpack. In fact, the entire California water system is built on snowpack. During the dry season the snow melts and keeps the flow of fresh water coming. No snowpack, no renewal. No replenishing the streams. No refilling the reservoirs. No recharging the aquifers. That’s what we have been experiencing lately. Unless we get a proper snowpack this winter we will suffer again next year.

The water-hungry can be forgiven for their obsession with El Niño. I’m not sure any of us can adequately describe an El Niño, but we will babble on about it and imbue the term with prayerful longing because we are desperate for relief. The rains will come at some point and most of the state will sigh contentedly, sure that it means the drought is over. But the high country folk will look at the snowpack and if it isn’t thickening steadily they will sigh resignedly, convinced once again that the gods of winter have cursed us.

And that’s where I am right now. In the dark heart of winter. I sit, watch, and wait for the storm clouds. I long for masses of saturated Arctic air to descend upon our little valley and the peaks that surround us. I need a sign that such will happen soon or I will be be weeping and gnashing my teeth, wailing and lamenting the cruel and capricious weather deities.

I’ll leave you with this. It’s a map of the West with current snowpack numbers compared to the 1981-2010 median for each region. Green, blue, and purple are good. Red, yellow, and brown are bad. I see a lot of bad. Tell me something good is on the way.

You can’t “Drill, Baby, Drill” without a few complications and one of the biggest is the low cost of natural gas. We are swimming in the stuff and it’s not always worth it—economically—to collect it and transport it from the wellhead to wherever it needs to go. Consequently we burn a lot of it off. Seems nuts, right? This is a high-quality, relatively clean fuel source and we waste it to the tune of 288 billion cubic feet annually. Is that a lot? The US consumes about 27 trillion cubic feet in a year so the amount that’s leaked, vented, and flared (burned off) represents about one percent. Of that 288 billion about 129 billion cubic feet or roughly 45% comes from North Dakota alone.

On the global scale the natural gas waste is about 5 trillion cubic feet meaning the US is responsible for about 5%-6% of that total. That number is growing, again mostly because of North Dakota. I’m not picking on the Peace Garden/Flickertail/Rough Rider State. We all burn oil. And when you drill for oil you often get gas. And in places where there is an infrastructure to get the gas you get the gas. Where there isn’t you vent it or burn it off. Turns out that methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide so burning it may be the better choice. Regardless, it’s a terrible waste. Here’s part of the reason why (from geology.com):

It costs money to move the stuff. Natural gas (which is mostly methane) is not very dense. It can’t be moved through a pipeline unless it is compressed. It can’t be shipped unless it is liquefied. It’s also quite combustible. This is why gasoline and diesel remain such valuable transportation fuels: they are relatively dense and thus relatively easy to move from one place to another. And they are a lot less combustible, especially diesel. Gases mix with air and ignite easier and burn faster than liquids. Automotive gasoline (petrol) is more volatile than diesel (it fumes easier and makes vapors more readily) and thus is more dangerous to store and carry. This is why we transport crude oil (denser and less volatile than its refined by-products) long distances and refine it closer to the markets. Natural gas also has to be processed—have moisture and impurities removed and any other useful hydrocarbons separated. These things not only cost money but require particular engineering solutions.

Even so, a big rich country like ours ought to not waste a valuable energy resource. In Saudi Arabia they’ve invested billions in schemes to recover the natural gas associated with their oil fields. What they can do, we can do. The difference of course is that their stuff is all nationalized and there is little separation between oil executives and energy ministers. In the States we like the “free market” to make its own rules and we tend to scream and holler about government involvement. Unless of course the government cleans the air, protects the water, and stabilizes prices!

North Dakota, particularly with the emergence of the Bakken shale as a major supplier of crude and now natural gas, has a flaring problem. The infrastructure is not there to take advantage of this abundant fossil fuel. Texas, for example, has a more well-developed gas recovery system in place and does not have the flaring waste issues we see in the north. Naturally there is a tug-of-war going on between the developers and the regulators and at some point the market and the populace and the governments involved will figure something out. Just how much we’ll burn off in the meantime remains to be seen.

Geologic time is another kind of magic. Who can conceive of those extraordinary spans of time? It takes a little over three years to equal 100 million seconds in our everyday existence. Three years worth of seconds is hard to grasp. Now think of those seconds as years. Can you imagine 100 million years? Maybe not, but that’s what the geologists ask of us. When they talk about the Rocky Mountains they tell us that they started growing 70 or 80 million years ago, an event they call the Laramide orogeny. This was after a time when present-day Wyoming was at the bottom of a gigantic inland sea. This mountain-building time lasted perhaps 25 million years. Again, those numbers! The Rockies formed then were high mountains and plateaus interspersed with broad, low-lying basins. Erosion stripped much of it away, and glaciation—very recent—carved the landscape we see today. The marine deposits of the ancient seaway created much of the oil and natural gas that lie under Wyoming. Once the mountains grew, the sea retreated and the basins became inland lakes fed by rivers. The climate was sub-tropical, and many of the basins were vast swamps surrounded by forests of ferns and deciduous trees. Over time these swamps were successively inundated and then buried by sediments. Enormous peat bogs formed, some the size of small states. Bury a peat bog deep enough and long enough and you get coal. Wyoming was the beneficiary of a remarkable sequence of geologic events that created its modern mineral wealth.

Coal, like oil, is amazing stuff. It fired the Industrial Revolution. Once it fueled all of our trains until diesel engines took over. These days it is mostly used to make electricity. According to the Energy Information Administration coal is the source of 39% of our electrical needs. But coal comes at a cost, like all fossil fuels. Coal has to be burned to make heat, the heat needed to make steam and turn a turbine. When you burn something you create waste. Coal makes a solid waste called CCR or Coal Combustion Residue. Some of it is fine material, or ash. There’s also boiler slag and the sulfur-laden materials collected from flue gas scrubbers. It’s a lot of stuff, over 100 million tons per year. Some of it can be used by the cement industry or gathered with gypsum to make things like wallboard. The rest has to be disposed of like all solid waste in landfills. Coal burning creates not only greenhouse gases but persistent air pollutants like nitrogen oxides. Not all the sulfur by-products can be scrubbed from the waste gases and those enter the atmosphere as well.

So what are we to do with this abundant and accessible resource? Obviously we are going to burn it but just as obviously we have to find ways to do it better. To those in the industry new technologies and methods can create “clean coal” which has a nice politically acceptable sound-bite ring to it. Environmentalists say such a phrase is oxymoronic, that coal cannot ever be “clean.” It’s a lot like gasoline. We know that our cars pollute but we keep driving because the costs are dispersed. That is, the impacts on the environment and on our health are spread out over the entire nation and sprinkled amongst us here and there. And we’ve seen the success of the Clean Air Act in places like Los Angeles where the air is cleaner because of the regulations and better automobile engines. It’s not like your neighbor collapses in an asthma attack when you start your car. If he did we might notice the effects of burning fossil fuels.

All extraction industries alter the landscape. That’s another cost. Mostly these things happen far from population centers so we don’t notice. And we live in an advanced country with some government oversight and opportunities for citizens to redress grievances or at least express their concerns. You can imagine the impact of fuel and mineral extraction in places where the ruling classes are insulated from the people and from the consequences of their rapaciousness.

Capitalism depends on growth. If your business isn’t growing you are failing. If we aren’t producing and consuming new products our economy tanks. If we don’t get the returns on our investments we can’t make new investments and the economy tanks some more. All of our politicians talk about growth. It’s a sacred tenet of the American way of life. We must continue to get bigger and better. We know there are limits to growth but we don’t want to hear about them. We just want to keep going. Some day, perhaps, we won’t be able to grow any more and we’ll have to figure out a new way to live. For now though we’ll keep the tanks full and keep cruising. Maybe we’ll see something on the journey that will open us up to new possibilities.

In the early days of electrification there were stories of old-timers who would not stand near outlets for fear of the electricity leaking out and on to them. It is called “current” and it is said to “flow” so it is not surprising they would feel as they did. Many descriptions of electricity concepts involve analogies with water systems—battery voltage as a kind of “pressure” for example, much like a municipal storage tank on a tower. These analogies always fall apart because electricity is not at all like water and to grasp what it is requires an effort of imagination much like wrapping your mind around geologic time. Oh, the electricians will tell you they get it, and the electrical engineers will throw differential equations at you, but that is not what I would call “understanding” electricity. Perhaps a few hundred dozen people in the world can communicate in QED, Quantum Electrodynamics, the contemporary theory that covers electromagnetic phenomena. The rest of us can’t or won’t do the math. I’m happy to think of it as magic. It’s a magic we mortals can manipulate, quite skillfully in fact, but a magic nonetheless.

What’s most magical to me about electricity is how swiftly it overtook our lives. James Clerk Maxwell published his eponymous equations in the 1860s and within twenty-five years Nikola Tesla was demonstrating AC induction motors. Within 100 years the developed world was electrified. Perhaps a billion to a billion and a half people in the world today live without electric power but for those of us reading blogs on Facebook life without electricity is unimaginable. Everything we do depends on plugging in. Safe and reliable electrical energy makes our modern world and our modern way of life possible. Did I mention affordable? Electricity in the U.S. is cheap, absurdly cheap. Right now I pay about 15¢ to the folks at Pacific Power for a kilowatt-hour. That means I can burn ten 100-watt light bulbs for ten hours for a buck-and-half. Or I can run my 300-watt computer continuously for a week, that’s 24/7, for about eight bucks.

I’m astonished and amazed by this. Abundant energy at a very low cost is available to me all the time wherever I go. I need not think about it. But I do think about it, it’s my curse. I think about everything. Here’s what I think: we should all know where our good life comes from. We should know what it takes to live the way we do. And what it takes is an elaborate system of resource extraction, power generation, and electricity distribution. Here’s a map from PacifiCorp, the parent company of our local utility:

Out in Wyoming in the southwestern corner you might be able to discern a dump truck icon which marks a coal-fired generating station. In this case it is the Jim Bridger Plant in Point of Rocks. Wyoming supplies more coal than any other state, meeting about 40% of the nation’s demand. In the Green River Basin there’s an underground mine—The Bridger—that produces about four million short tons of coal annually. That’s pretty small as the big surface mines in other parts of the state can crank out ten to twenty times that. But it’s enough for PacifiCorp to generate two Gigawatts of electricity, of which half goes to Pacific Power customers in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. Pacific Power’s total capacity is about eleven Gigawatts so the coal plant represents less than ten percent of their energy portfolio. It’s about the same as hydroelectric which is also roughly one Gigawatt. By comparison PacifiCorp’s Top of the World wind farm (the largest of two dozen such facilities) in Wyoming puts out about 200 Megawatts or 0.2 Gigawatts.

Coal is messy, dirty stuff. Like oil. It’s also abundant. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal and Wyoming is the Ghawar Field. With carbon emissions and climate change the hot topics these days coal has lost its allure. But the resource isn’t going anywhere. And it is still the largest source of energy for electric power generation in the world and will remain a valuable part of the mix for the foreseeable future. We may stop demanding coal, but we won’t stop demanding electricity. I’ll take a look at the black stuff in my next post.

EROEI is not a Star Wars character but rather an acronym for Energy Return On Energy Invested (also written as EROI). It takes energy as well as capital to exploit a resource. Ideally the resource is valuable enough that the investment of dollars needed to get it is worth it. But what of the energy requirements? How much gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and electricity does it take to get a barrel of oil? And at what point does the energy invested become too much? After the oil peak in the 1970s we have come to rely more and more on improved extraction technologies (e.g., “fracking”) and lower-grade resources like shale and the oil sands. This so-called “tight” oil is increasingly the target of our insatiable lust for the black gold. Think about picking fruit from a tree. You get the low-hanging stuff first, then need a ladder, a bucket truck, or the heart of a daredevil to get the rest. That’s where we are with oil.

In Alberta they mine about two tons of sand to get a barrel of oil. That’s for the easy stuff that’s close to the surface and where they can use open-pit mining techniques. Electric shovels scoop up about 100 tons in one pass and fill giant trucks that can haul about 400 tons to the processing facility. Here’s what the equipment looks like (from the Caterpillar website):

According to calculations made by J. David Hughes of the Post Carbon Institute (in Drill, Baby, Drill) the EROEI for tar sands oil is about 5-to-1. That’s because the bitumen has to be upgraded—separated from the rock it sits in and and diluted to reduce its viscosity so it will flow in a pipeline. Just digging the stuff up is a 12-to-1 venture, the additional processing to obtain the “synthetic” crude that can be shipped to refineries is where the real cost comes in. Note that I have not looked at economic or ecologic costs, just energy requirements. Here’s a picture of part of the process, a “coker tower” (from the Suncor website), where petroleum coke is extracted and used as fuel:

So is 5-to-1 a good deal? According to EROI of different fuels and the implications for society by Hall, et. al. the average global EROEI for “conventional” fossil fuels is about 20-to1. So the numbers tell us what we knew intuitively, that the new sources of oil are not as energy efficient as the old ones. This is the thing—our demand is increasing. More and more people in the world want the good life and that good life is energy intensive. Our planet holds, still, enormous resources of fossil fuels. Due to their energy density and transportability these fuels will not be replaced any time soon. But the easy pickings are already picked clean. The stuff we go after now is harder to get and much more expensive. In fact, low oil prices make the exploitation of these resources increasingly difficult. When oil was $100/barrel it made sense to chase after them. When the price of crude drops the economics are hard to justify. Consumers and voters like cheap gas, but that’s short-term thinking. Only when the price of oil is high will North American tight oil, whether from Alberta, North Dakota, or Utah, be worth it.

Junkies know about supply and demand. Addiction is demand writ large. Supply is always a problem and cost becomes irrelevant at a certain point. If you gotta have it you gotta have it. That’s us. We gotta have it. How much are we willing to pay?

A barrel of crude oil is 42 US gallons. About half of that barrel is refined into automotive fuel or what we call “gasoline” in the States and other English speakers call “petrol.” Note that this does not include diesel fuel. Last year Americans burned about 375 million gallons of gasoline per day, or a little more than one gallon per citizen per day. There are about 320 million citizens, and 375÷320 is 1.17, but we’ll round off to “one” for convenience. Still, that’s a staggering number. I can go anywhere from 32 to 40 miles on one gallon of petrol in my Honda and about half that distance in my VW camper.

What’s this got to do with Canada? Just that we import more oil from the Land of the Maple Leaf than from anywhere else. About half of Canada’s total production comes from the Alberta oil sands, some two million barrels of crude per day, and they ship about three million barrels per day to their southern neighbors. That’s right—about three of every four barrels of oil produced in Canada come to the United States. We import about nine million barrels per day total so Canada accounts for a third of our imports. The recent domestic production boom here in the States is pretty close to that, The Energy Information Administration says we are closing in on ten million barrels produced daily, the highest total in thirty years.

So when you burn gas in your car you can assume that half of it is American, half of it is foreign, and of that foreign half a third is Canadian, with half of that from the Athabasca. So, yeah, you are burning the oil sands whether you like it or not.

Like I said before I’ve no intention of getting on a soapbox. You can politicize this stuff all you want, I won’t. I want to know what it takes to live the life I do, the life we all live. We First-World Western Industrial Society People, that is. What we don’t grow, we mine. And oil is one of the things we mine. We dig big holes in the ground, yank the stuff out, and process the shit out of it. That’s something. That’s a hell of an undertaking and I want to appreciate it fully.

I like to spend my time outdoors and I love trees and mountains and birds and rocks and streams and all that stuff. And I burn a hell of a lot of gas getting to places that give me that. Not to mention I live in a rural area far from seaports and factories so everything has to be trucked over an extensive highway infrastructure and supported by a gigantic electric power grid.

I’ll leave you with a satellite photo of a portion of the Athabasca oil sands development (from NASA Earth Observatory “World of Change“)):