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Legislators want Connecticut to plan for oil shortage
Brian Lockhart, Stamford Advocate
A coalition of state lawmakers has issued a report that concludes Connecticut is “completely unprepared” for what experts are forecasting as a sharply constrained supply of oil in the world.
“However, early intervention can and will mitigate the severity of impacts on the state and our people,” says the report from the Peak Oil Caucus of the General Assembly.
(26 November 2007)
Energy expert Udall looks to the future
Scott Condon, The Aspen Times
‘Peak oil’ will soon dwarf global warming as public concern
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After 13 years at the helm of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE), Randy Udall stepped down this month.
As the director of the department created by the governments of Aspen and
Pitkin County, he helped create numerous innovative, conservation-minded programs.
Fortunately, the longtime Carbondale resident is staying put and will remain a leading voice in the region on energy issues. Udall is in high demand as a speaker at energy conferences and with conservation groups because of his grasp of the changing picture on our fossil fuel lifestyle.
Prior to joining CORE, Udall was a college drop-out who worked as a carpenter and an Outward Bound instructor before becoming a freelance writer who concentrated on energy and environmental projects.
…AT: You have spent a considerable amount of time educating people about peak oil. Do people “get it” and are they willing to make adjustments to their lifestyles?
RU: Our peak oil conference in Houston in October was the largest in the world this year. The Wall Street Journal ran a cover article on the topic this week. People are beginning to understand that energy – not the yen, euro or dollar – is the original currency, the source of all wealth. Most of the Houston presenters were Republicans, and the audience included many financial managers. Visit www.theoildrum.com, if you are interested in following the evolving discussion. Global oil production may have already peaked; if not, it will do so in the next four years. This topic is likely to soon dwarf climate change as a matter of public concern.
(26 November 2007)
Why I Won’t Be Buying Vernon Coleman’s ‘Oil Apocalypse’.
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
The other day in the Independent, a full page ad drew my attention to the latest book by Vernon Coleman, ‘Oil Apocalypse’ (note this is not a link). Vernon Coleman has previously produced countless books, mostly based on fear-mongering and reactionary politics, and now he has hopped onto the peak oil bandwagon. The way Coleman’s books work is simple; here is a problem, it is far bigger and worse than you thought, be afraid, this is whose fault it is. …
- Rather than a flowing narrative it was arranged in numbered points, with no connection to each other (I will write the rest of this post in that style so you can see how truly irritating it is). They ranged from the sensible and insightful to the absurd. For example you might have number 35 (I don’t have the book to refer to, I threw it into my compost heap on completion) being the fact that the US has deposed x number of democratically elected governments (fair point), and then fact 36 being that Americans are fat. …
- It is inevitable that as the peak looms we will find more and more such books emerging. Of course peak oil is scary and its potential impacts are severe. But whether we choose to see it as a crisis or an opportunity is key. I see it as the potential for the greatest economic, social and cultural renaissance the world has ever seen, not for retreating into our bunkers, trusting no-one, safe with our baked beans and our investment portfolios. Our way through it will rely on our ability to rebuild connections with those around us. Coleman does us all a huge disservice by peddling such nonsense. As with most of his books, he has taken about 30% reasonable argument and weaved 70% fear-based, reactionary, ill-researched, self-above-others nonsense around it. It was inevitable that he would eventually turn his beady eye to peak oil, yet if the publicity achieves such levels of hysteria and fear-mongering, you can be rest assured, like the rest of Coleman’s titles, that the book itself is just more of the same.
(22 November 2007)
A classic book review.
Oil prices and responding to the strange lack of response
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
$100-a-barrel crude oil is no longer rhetoric but reality. Almost nothing is changing in the life of the consumer or in government policy, so it’s time to assess what the heck is going on. “What is going to happen?” is one worthy question. But it is time we take a break from manufactured distractions to part the curtain of delusion, and ask the more empowering question: What shall we make happen?
Take a moment to ignore the ongoing noise from corrupt commentators tied to our terminal economic system. Do it right and rebuff the seductive feel-goodism from greenies making a living from “sustainability.” The peak oil movement itself has peaked, and it’s worth examining why. The players, especially the mainstream reporters and editors, are compromised by who’s paying the bills: their corporate sponsors and advertisers. Mother Earth shows up as an afterthought in the design of programs and agendas, including among some peak oilists who may anticipate some new energy future as they discount climate change.
But in the main, peak oil and petrocollapse are having a tough time competing for major attention because fears, led by our climate’s scary unraveling, mount with no end in sight. Ironically, the cause of the problem and our real options are hidden and exacerbated by (A) the tendency to compartmentalize ecology and (B) be seduced by the economic advantages of selling so-called “green” solutions to the symptoms. With all this in mind, I offer nine bulleted realizations below that may shock. They are based on my thirty-five year career watching the oil industry and my response up to this moment.
…Let me burst a misconception about oil prices especially in the U.S.: Almost every oil analyst, including Trilby Lundberg, as well as almost every economist, suggests that oil and gasoline price-levels when adjusted for inflation reflect their true heights. But always omitted is the fact that huge subsidies for petroleum, both hidden and direct, approach the size of the Pentagon budget each year and make for an unacknowledged, “astronomical” cost we’ve been paying all along.
…We’re at the short global peak-oil plateau, in our second or third year. So petrocollapse is standing at the door ready to devastatingly equalize the contradictions of resource-limits and unending growth. This period is NOT the beginning of “the second half of the age of oil,” or even a time of “energy decline” (as if the oil industry can offer steadily lower output of crude and products, which it’s not prepared or designed to do).
(21 November 2007)
Energy Bulletin contributor Dan Bednarz adds some more points at the end of Jan’s essay. -BA
The Peak Oil Theory
Robert Mabro, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies via Energy Publisher
The peak oil theory has a harmful impact because it focuses on the wrong problem and in doing so it shifts attention away from more vital issues
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… A statement of the type ‘All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal’ does not constitute a prediction but the deduction of a self-evident truth.To say that an exhaustible resource will be exhausted is not a prediction but, under certain conditions, a tautology.
… The authors of the peak oil theory ignore one or several of the points made here above. This results in predictions of a more imminent production peak and an earlier exhaustion than will actually happen.
Nevertheless the peak oil theorists are right on two issues: the significant decline in discoveries which peaked as long ago as in 1961 and the recent failure of discoveries to replace the full amount of oil produced. This tells us that oil is being depleted and that exhaustibility is a real issue. It does not answer, however, the when question.
… There is no ‘physical’ problem in the long run. There are, however, investment problems on the transition path from the oil to the ‘other liquids’ era. The ride is likely to be bumpy. And what we need to worry about now, and seek solutions to, are the investment and technical progress issues. Governments of OECD countries and private energy companies are not yet addressing these problems, worrying instead about the imminence of peak oil (a falsely alarming issue) for the security of energy supplies (a grossly misunderstood concept) and climate change (the most important about which the most significant polluters are unwilling to tackle.)
Re-focusing the debate away from the peak oil paranoia and towards the need to invest in the production of liquid fuels at the right time will put us on the road to a solution.
Published by Oxford Institute for Energy Studies
(22 November 2007)
One of the better articles criticizing peak oil theory, although I think most of its objections have been answered.
Interestingly, the article starts out by saying that the idea of peak oil is self-evident. Thus we we have passed into the last stage a truth reaching acceptance. According to a widely disseminated quote (sometimes attributed to Schopenhauer):
“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
