Resilience Roundup – Apr 24

April 24, 2015

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A roundup of news, views and ideas from the main stream press and the blogosphere.  Click on the headline link to see the full article.


Adriaan – ‘Energy for One World’ – Kamp (ex-Shell): “Strategy of oil companies is doomed to failure”

Karel Beckman, Energy Post
Oil companies like Shell have unique skills that make them ideally placed to help build the energy world of the future. Yet they seem unable to look beyond their own interests, says Adriaan Kamp, former Shell manager and founder of Oslo-based consultancy Energy For One World. “Like the banks, they can’t change their ways. They are still making too much money with oil and gas.” According to Kamp, the growth strategy of the oil companies is still based exclusively on expanding their oil and gas business – in Shell’s case most of all LNG. “They leave it to others to come up with the real solutions.” Kamp is convinced this strategy is doomed to failure. “The present energy system cannot continue as it is.”…


New Report: March 2015 Easily Set The Record For Hottest March Ever Recorded

Joe Romm, Think Progress
This was easily the hottest March — and hottest January-to-March — on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA’s latest monthly report makes clear Mother Nature is just getting warmed up:

  • March 2015 was not only the hottest March in their 135-year of keeping records, it beat “the previous record of 2010 by 0.09°F (0.05°C).”
  • January-to-March was not only the hottest start to any year on record, it also beat “the previous record of 2002 by 0.09°F.”
  • March was so warm that only two other months ever had a higher “departure from average” (i.e. temperature above the norm), February 1998 and January 2007, and they only beat March by “just 0.01°C (0.02°F).”
  • Arctic sea ice hit its smallest March extent since records began in 1979.


War, hedge funds and China: why oil will hit $100 a barrel

Andrew Critchlow, The Daily Telegraph
It wouldn’t be the first time that oil experts have got it spectacularly wrong when predicting the price of crude…

So why has the short-term outlook for oil changed overnight?

Lower prices have started to filter through to boosting growth in the world’s most advanced economies and with it demand for gasoline, which is once again on the rise.

Here are six reasons why oil is heading back to $100:…


Has The U.S. Reached “Peak Oil” At Current Price Levels?

Leonard Brecken, Oil Price
Last night the EIA once again capitulated on the myth that rig counts don’t matter and the productivity of wells would largely offset, leaving the industry on a continuous path to higher output. The current consensus of 500,000 B/D additional growth in 2015 US production now appears very much at risk.

Look how far we have come, folks, from all that media hysteria this past year. Yesterday, Reuters even wrote an article stating that the EIA prediction of a sequential decline in oil production in May vs. April would be the first, if proven, true prediction. Meanwhile, fact checking would indicate that this, in fact, occurred last week as reported here. In any event the EIA now thinks that production will decline 57,000 B/D in May counter to earlier expectations that the Permian would largely offset declines in the Eagle Ford and the Bakken. This is despite higher productivity of existing wells proving that rig count does matter and the market has underestimated the effects of high decline rates…

…but not everyone agrees…


Oil slump may deepen as US shale fights Opec to a standstill

Ambrose Evans Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph
Continental’s Harold Hamm says US shale industry has ‘only begun to scratch the surface’ of vast and cheap reserves, driving growth for years to come..


US carbon emissions are rising again. Can Obama push them back down?

Brad Plumer, Vox
One of the most promising climate-change stories of the last decade was the steep plunge in US carbon dioxide emissions after 2005. Before then, US emissions had been rising relentlessly for decades. Suddenly, they were falling. That drop was partly due to the US fracking boom, which created a glut of cheap natural gas and spurred utilities to burn less coal for electricity. It was partly due to various clean-energy and efficiency measures. And it was partly making real progress on global warming…

Overall, US carbon dioxide emissions from energy are still about 10 percent below the levels they were back in 2005. But emissions are no longer falling rapidly the way they used to. And that’s a potential problem for President Obama’s plans to tackle global warming…


Climate adaptation could slash cost of flood damages by 96%, study shows

Roz Pidcock, Carbon Brief
Without efforts to build resilience, the economic losses from global flooding are expected to rise by at least 430% by 2080, and possibly as much as 2,000%, scientists warn.

The number of global fatalities could rise by as much as 200% in the same time, according to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But ambitious adaptation efforts in flood-prone countries could cut the potential economic costs by 96% and reduce global fatalities by 69%, say the scientists.

The authors say the new study is the first to project how vulnerable the world’s population and economies are to future flooding, and how adaptation could reduce the potential damages…


Scientists set out eight essential elements for UN climate deal

Sophie Yeo, Carbon Brief
Seventeen high-profile scientists have set out eight demands for the UN negotiations on climate change in Paris at the end of this year.

These "essential elements" must be part of the UN’s new agreement to ensure a climatically safe future where global temperatures are limited to below 2C and irreversible planetary changes are avoided, says the statement, compiled by the Earth League of scientists.

Released to coincide with Earth Day, the intervention is backed by scientists from across the globe, including Ottmar Edenhofer and Youba Sokona, who co-chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report into the options for avoiding dangerous climate change.v Several of the elements are more ambitious than the pathways outlined by the IPCC, however, and go beyond the level of ambition currently on the table for Paris…


How Many Americans Don’t Know How To Ride A Bike?

Mona Chalalbi, FiveThirtyEight
In August 2013, YouGov commissioned a survey titled “Bikes & Edward Snowden.” Thankfully, the survey treated the two topics separately — I’ve yet to receive a Dear Mona question that asks about Edward Snowden’s cycling habits. (It’s actually pretty common for pollsters to tack on some extra questions about, say, horsemeat to a survey about working remotely — it saves them time and money.) And so, Brandon, I have an answer for you based on the responses of 1,196 U.S. adults: 6 percent of Americans don’t know how to ride a bike….

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News clippings image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

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