Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A retired Irish geologist is at the center of a small, but suddenly influential, band of contrarians known as the peak-oil movement, which believes that by as early as next year, humanity will have burned through half the oil it will ever get, and that the era of cheap oil is over.
Fuelling world prices, China’s crude oil imports jumped 37.4 per cent in August from the same month a year earlier to 9.33 million metric tons (70 million barrels), the government reports.
German Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin recently inaugurated a large solar-powered energy plant in the eastern city of Espenhain, noting that Germany is the leading European country to install solar energy facilities.
Cherrapunjee, in the northeastern state of Meghalaya (the “Land of Clouds”), is a “wet desert”, and a case study in environmental degradation, deforestation and resource mismanagement.
Glaciers in Antarctica’s most rapidly warming region have quickened their pace following the collapse of a Delaware-sized ice shelf in March 2002, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder and a related study by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Beijing is pushing the Russian government to intervene to get Russia’s top oil exporter to continue all its shipments to China. The Russian company Yukos says it will stop crude oil deliveries next week because it cannot afford the shipping costs.
What is striking about both books [Blood and Oil by Klare and Oil: Anatomy of an Industry by Yeomans]… is that they argue that the United States can avoid the petro-military dystopia if Americans (a) get Bush out of office, (b) make a concerted effort to create and exploit alternative fuels, and (c) — in Klare’s words — “reduce American dependence on imported oil and … sever the links between our energy behavior and our overseas security commitments.”
Since about 1999 per capita world average oil consumption is increasing. This recovery, after a long decline through about 1980-2000, has strong implications for potential oil demand, and potential annual growth of world oil demand as we enter the period immediately preceding ‘Peak Oil’.
Securing supply tops the energy-policy agenda. That is the message coming loud and clear from more than 60 energy-industry leaders, including big-company CEOs and senior government officials, recently surveyed by the World Economic Forum…. History shows that policymakers will put price and supply before social and environmental concerns.
Limited spare capacity means that the ability of oil producers to meet the sharpest rise in demand since the 1970s is likely to be severely tested, according to experts attending an OPEC-sponsored seminar in Vienna.
Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute have come up with a proposal to save American capitalism from the end of the age of oil.
If alternative-energy companies are so hot, why are their stocks so unpopular? Record-high oil prices make wind and solar increasingly competitive. Fear of climate change should brighten prospects for any alternative to fossil fuels, which release the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Yet over the past two years, the worldwide stock-market value of companies developing renewable energy—which includes everything from wind and solar to recycling—fell from $13 billion to $10.7 billion, while the value of fossil-fuel companies surged to record highs of more than $1.2 trillion.
