Reasons to doubt US shale oil rebound
Ed Crooks, Financial Times
If finance flows dry up, a crude price rally may not spur output…
The looming threat to American oil output
Tom DiChristopher, CNBC
In recent weeks, the market has shifted its attention from cratering crude prices to the falling number of rigs operating in American oilfields. But in the coming months, the very life cycle of many of those wells may have many market watchers concerned about output and price stability, experts told CNBC.
Oil wells—whether conventional or unconventional—reach peak production soon after they yield the first drop of crude. The difference is how quickly they enter decline…
Fossil fuel lobby goes on the attack against divestment movement
Damian Carrington, The Guardian
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,” said Mahatma Gandhi. The climate change campaign to divest from fossil fuels seems to be moving through those stages at express speed, with a sudden barrage of attacks from the coal and oil lobbies ahead of its global divestment day on Valentine’s day.
The speed is appropriate given that the campaign, which argues the fossil fuel industry is a danger to both the climate and investors’ capital, is the fastest growing divestment campaign yet seen, moving quicker than those against tobacco and apartheid. It’s moving fast in the financial world too, with one finance executive calling it “one of the fastest-moving debates I think I’ve seen in my 30 years in markets”…
What has the divestment movement achieved so far?
Sophie Yeo, RTCC
Divesting from fossil fuels will make your clothes and your kitchen disappear.
This is the latest hyperbole in the battle over the future of energy…
IEA: New normal for oil as cheap prices fail to ignite demand
Simon Evans, Carbon Brief
The global oil market is entering a new phase where cheap oil is failing to ignite growth in demand, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.
Demand growth will remain sluggish because of fuel switching, more fuel-efficient cars, reduced oil subsidies and structural changes in the global economy, according to the IEA’s Medium-Term Oil Market Report, published today…
The Cost of Clean Coal
Sara Bernard, Grist
A Grist Special Report.
A Mississippi power plant promises to create clean energy from our dirtiest fuel. But it will come at a price…
Climate Is Big Issue for Hispanics, and Personal
Coral Davenport, New York Times
Alfredo Padilla grew up in Texas as a migrant farmworker who followed the harvest with his parents to pick sugar beets in Minnesota each summer. He has not forgotten the aches of labor or how much the weather — too little rain, or too much — affected the family livelihood.
Now an insurance lawyer in Carrizo Springs, Tex., he said he was concerned about global warming.
“It’s obviously happening, the flooding, the record droughts,” said Mr. Padilla, who agrees with the science that human activities are the leading cause of climate change. “And all this affects poor people harder. The jobs are more based on weather. And when there are hurricanes, when there is flooding, who gets hit the worst? The people on the poor side of town.”…
Protect human rights to safeguard forests, say campaigners
Ed King, RTCC
A planned new global climate change deal must recognise land and resource rights in order to protect vulnerable forest communities, say campaigners.
They warn that, without tougher international safeguards, human rights abuses against indigenous people and environmentalists fighting deforestation will continue to rise.
A report released last Wednesday by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says soaring demand for rubber, oil palm, cattle and soy has decimated forests once owned by local people…
The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money
Whitney Mallett, Motherboard
The motto of Dauphin, Manitoba, a small farming town in the middle of Canada, is “everything you deserve.” What a citizen deserves, and what effects those deserts have, was a question at the heart of a 40-year-old experiment that has lately become a focal point in a debate over social welfare that’s raging from Switzerland to Silicon Valley.
Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since. For those four years—until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away—the town’s poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school. ..
Man In The Maze
Phil Buccellato and Jesse Ash, and Food Tank, Greener Media/Food Tank
Throughout the U.S. borderlands, a diverse group of people come up with innovative solutions to mend our broken food system.
"Man In The Maze" | Sundance Short Film Challenge from Sundance Institute on Vimeo.
Brazil drought: water rationing alone won’t save Sao Paulo
Marussia Whately and Rebeca Lerer, The Guardian
It should be the rainy season. Instead Sao Paulo state is experiencing a third consecutive year with soaring temperatures and rainfall patterns well below historic records.
The main water reservoirs are operating at their lowest capacity. The Cantareira reservoir system, which serves more than nine million people in the state, is only 5% full. At the Alto Tietê reservoir network, which supplies three million people in greater Sao Paulo, water levels are below 15%.
Simple calculations indicate that given the current level of consumption versus the predicted raining patterns there is only enough water on the system to last four to six months. That means the water could run out before the next rainy season starts in November. State officials recently announced a potential rationing program of five days without water and two days with, in case the February and March rains do not refill the reservoirs…
Anti-‘Geoengineering’ National Academy Report Opposes ‘Climate-Altering Deployment’
Joe Romm, Think Progress
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has released two very pessimistic reports on geoengineering.
Well, actually the reports are on “climate intervention,” because the Academy panel rejects the widely used term “geoengineering.” Why? Because “we felt ‘engineering’ implied a level of control that is illusory,” explained Dr. Marcia McNutt who led the report committee. The word “intervention” makes it clearer that the “precise outcome” could not be known in advance.
The first report is on “Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration,” which covers everything that could permanently remove CO2 out of the air — from reforestation to direct capture of CO2 from the air.
The second report is on “Reflecting Sunlight,” which covers the more exotic climate-altering strategies to increase the reflectivity (albedo) of the Earth. The best studied of these is injecting vast quantities of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanos. The authors also reject the widely used umbrella term for these strategies, “solar radiation management,” in favor of “albedo modification” because, again, “management” implies a level of control of the outcome that the committee does not believe we have…
What is Vision Zero?
Jennifer Langston, Sightline Daily
When you ask people to estimate how many people are killed on American roads each year, the answers vary widely: 1 million? 500,000? 40,000? 2,000?…
As the video below shows, when you ask them what Washington state’s traffic death goal should be, most people have no idea. They offer tentative guesses, ranging from fewer than 100 to 5,000. (For context, there are actually about 33,000 annual US traffic deaths now, and 437 people lost their lives on Washington roads in 2013.)
When the same people are asked again what the state’s traffic death goal should be, everyone smiles. Now they have an answer they believe in: Zero. That should be the goal for everyone.
That’s the driving principle behind Vision Zero, a movement that started in Sweden in 1997. More recently, it’s spread to US cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and even Los Angeles. Both Portland and Seattle plan to roll out local Vision Zero plans too. So it’s worth examining what Vision Zero is—and what it is not.
I quit my job to set up a post-apocalyptic commune
Dylan Evans, The Guardian
Dylan Evans was worried about the end of the world. So he sold his house and headed for the Scottish Highlands with his cat, Socrates, and a couple of yurts. What could possibly go wrong?…
