Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
…at a national energy conference Thursday on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio Gov. Bob Taft and other attendees acknowledged the world has little time left to counter the consequences of widespread fossil fuel use before dramatic and expensive action is inescapable.
The post-peak oil world will look a lot like the bleak 1970s. But much worse.
A recession will grip the globe because the price of oil, and everything tied to it, will skyrocket.
Starvation will abound because oil-based fertilizers we’ve grown to depend on will be in short supply. Energy wars could erupt to control the remaining oil fields.
Oil is the world’s biggest business and one of its most combustible. It has drawn all sorts of eccentrics, from H.L. “Boy” Hunt, gambling host and bigamist, to Armand Hammer, Kremlin confidante and bull semen salesman. It has fueled inflation, recession, pollution, scandal and war.
Early on, oil made modern Cleveland.
The granddaddy of fossil fuels that has fouled the air, poisoned the waters — and created the industrial revolution — will also be the fuel of the digital age. Coal, called an antique fuel by some environmentalists, still produces more than half the electricity in the nation.
The life and times of Col. Edwin Drake, who drilled the world’s first commercial oil well near Titusville, PA in 1859. It is not overstating the case to say that the seed of the modern world, so dependent as it is upon energy and materials derived from petroleum, was planted by Col. Drake.
The first oil wells, paraffin and President Lincoln.
Using the Trans Canada Railroad as an analogy, King recounts the timeline of geologic history up to the present. Within the span of the last few inches of a 4,500 mile timeline, humankind will have consumed all of the Earth’s oil heritage.
Peak Oil is a real phenomenon, based on hard science. Ignore it at your peril. At root, the Peak Oil guys are right. How can I emphasize it properly? OK, they are “right, right, right.” Everybody else is “wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Early days in the oil fields: wildcatters, investment fever and dead horses
Wildcatting and exploration in the Canadian Maritimes — how an oil geologist and investor sees the landscape.
Here, then, is a significant report produced by an independent research company for the US Department of Energy, warning of a global problem of “unprecedented” proportions with economic, social, and political impacts that are likely to be extremely severe. The authors forecast “protracted economic hardship” for the United States and the rest of the world. It is a problem that deserves “immediate, serious attention.” Yet, half a year after release, discussion of the Hirsch report is conspicuously absent from the press and the halls of Congress. [updated version late 7/31]
Will FERC force LNG terminals on unwilling communities? /
Michael Bagley on the energy bill /
Salon: The porking of the energy bill /
Big Brother at work by Michael Klare
