Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Darley: Obama Will Need Energy Realism, Not More Economic Alchemy
Julian Darley, Post Carbon Institute
America and the world wakes this morning to a landscape of new possibilities. We also wake up to a daunting list of problems, most of which are now well known. Yet still there is one problem that was never mentioned by either presidential candidate, no doubt for their own good reasons. The problem is one that has been waiting in the wings since 1859. Or 1846 if you live in Russia.1 These are the dates of the first oil wells in the world, and they mark the beginning of our dependence on oil, a dependence which is now being forced into reverse.
Peak oil and decline has to become a dominant factor in political and business planning because otherwise, the wrong remedies are going to be applied to the wrong causal diagnosis. The world headlines this morning helpfully remind Obama and his new team that they face some severe economic woes. I am sure they are very grateful for that information.2
What they need to hear about are the underlying reasons for the financial meltdown, the credit crisis and ensuing economic contraction. Jeff Rubin, of CIBC, makes the case strongly in a recent report, that high oil prices – caused by supply constraints not meeting demand – are the real cause of the economic crash.
(X November 2008)
McKibben: President Obama’s Big Climate Challenge
Bill McKibben, Yale Environment 360
As he assumes the presidency, Barack Obama must make climate-change legislation and investment in green energy top priorities. And he must be ready to take bold — and politically unpopular — action to address global warming.
—
And so our eight-year interlude from reality draws to a close, and the job of cleaning up begins. The trouble is, we’re not just cleaning up after a failed presidency. We’re cleaning up after a two-century binge.
Barack Obama won an historic victory yesterday, and with it the right to take office under the most difficult circumstances since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maybe more difficult, because while both FDR and Obama had financial meltdowns to deal with, Obama also faces the meltdown meltdown — the rapid disintegration of the planet’s climate system that threatens to challenge the very foundations of our civilization.
Do you think that sounds melodramatic? Let me give it to you from the abstract of a scientific paper written earlier this year by one of the people who now work for Mr. Obama, NASA scientist James Hansen. “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm.” In other words, if we keep increasing carbon any longer, the earth itself will make our efforts moot.
Hansen’s calculation is a scientifically grounded way of saying: Everything must change at once.
(5 November 2008)
Obama victory signals rebirth of US environmental policy
John Vidal, The Guardian
President-elect Obama will shred the Bush administration’s energy policies and introduce a major climate change bill in an attempt to bring the US back into the international environment fold according to his senior advisers.
Obama talked of the “planet in peril” in his acceptance speech – a clear reference to climate change. He will now send his own energy representatives to the UN’s climate change talks in Poznam, Poland, in three weeks’ time.
He is also expected to announce a goal of reducing US greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and then cutting them by 80% by 2050. This will be via a cap-and-trade system with carbon permits auctioned off to industries to encourage them to reduce emissions…
(5 November 2008)
Under Obama, Dark Days Seen Ahead For Fossil Fuels
CNN Money
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- Under President-elect Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the fossil fuels industry may face “dark days ahead,” while alternative energy sectors are likely to flourish.
Although it will take years to engineer and implement, an Obama administration energy and environment policy marks a tectonic shift for the nation. He would move the U.S. away from petroleum as its primary energy source and towards renewable energy, advanced biofuels, efficiency and low greenhouse-gas-emitting technologies.
Obama won the U.S. presidential race Tuesday evening, sweeping battleground states such as Ohio and Florida.
Sen. Obama’s lynchpin policy is a climate change bill that would cap emissions such as carbon dioxide and auction greenhouse gas credits to encourage a fundamental transition away from high emitting industries to low-carbon alternatives. Obama said such a policy would be more aggressive than any other cap-and-trade system proposed…
(05 November 2008)
US Vote Seen As One-Way Bet For Solar, Wind Power
Braden Reddall and Nichola Groom, Reuters via Planet Ark
An anticipated Democratic US election sweep is thrilling solar and wind power investors because that outcome is seen as a big step toward establishing federal requirements for alternative power generation.
Analysts said a national mandate for generating renewable power would be a relatively easy first step in any “green” agenda because dozens of states already have such policies, and the cost to a cash-strapped government would be negligible.
US voters were casting their ballots Tuesday, and Democrat Barack Obama held a decisive lead over Republican John McCain in national opinion polls, and Democrats are expected to win more seats in Congress.
(5 November 2008)
Barack Obama: the view from Iran
Ian Black, The Guardian
Iranians reacted positively to Barack Obama’s election, saluting the choice of the American people in breaking with George Bush’s policies and hoping – despite years of deep mutual mistrust – for better relations between Tehran and Washington.
The US and Iran have been locked in hostility for nearly three decades and are at odds over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, its support for groups like Hizbullah and Hamas and comments by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust.
Passersby canvassed by the Guardian on Valiasr Avenue, Tehran’s longest thoroughfare, were overwhelmingly pleased with the result and cautiously optimistic about the future.
“Obama was a good choice for Americans,” said Ali Zadek, 29, a company director. “If they’d wanted confrontation with the rest of the world they would have chosen McCain. He added, half-joking: “I would like Americans to have elected someone like Ahmadinejad to be their president just so they would know how bad things are here.”…
(5 November 2008)
