Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
From Oct. 24-26, a coalition of ecoactivist groups, including Extinction Rebellion Northeast, Extinction Rebellion DC, or XRDC, Scientist Rebellion, and Climate Defiance, engaged in three days of nonviolent actions against the gas industry in Washington, D.C.
New areas for oil and gas development on the UK’s North Sea continental shelf are to be made available through annual licensing rounds subject to net zero tests. These proposals by the UK government, outlined in the 2023 king’s speech to parliament, fly in the face of recommendations by the Climate Change Committee – the government’s own independent advisers.
It may seem odd that I’d begin an essay on the topic of energy descent as I am, by speaking of this theme specifically as a topic of philosophical concern. But I have my reasons for doing so, as hopefully you’ll soon understand.
On my latest flight surveying fossil fuel industry sites in southwest Louisiana at the end of September, I photographed liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities, signs of drought, fire-scarred stretches of marsh, and a salt dome site at risk of collapsing.
Our tracking shows there is now 783 gigawatts (GW) of oil- and gas-power capacity under development – projects that are either announced or in the pre-construction and construction phases. These represent a stranded asset risk of hundreds of billions of dollars and potentially locking in tens of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
What Colombia is to cocaine, the U.S. is to hydrocarbons—a supplier/pusher of molecules so dangerous that the two poles are now melting fast.
A living culture wouldn’t — doesn’t — refuse abstractions. It simply provides abstractions, like numbers, with a proper and limited focus and scope.
The information economy was supposed to be light on physical resources compared to the old industrial economy. Turns out it’s not.
Existing sampling technologies used to determine mineral density on the seabed estimate volumes 3-5x greater than all known land-based reserves. Yet studies on the environmental effects of creating plumes of sediment that will settle and cover (and smother) organisms on the sea floor or the effects of ploughing up large areas of the sea floor indicate that for all practical purposes, the damage is permanent.
If it is allowed to proceed, this single project could undo all of our efforts to cut emissions. Beetaloo and Middle Arm are a climate bomb. They will produce vast volumes of emissions which cannot be offset.
We need far, far more than a green energy retrofit. We need an entirely different way of existing on this unique, imperiled planet—a way that many Indigenous people are still familiar with.
The Crown has today dropped the last remaining case in the Treasury Fire Engine Trial after the jury acquitted five of the six defendants of conspiracy to commit criminal damage to His Majesty’s Treasury building by a majority verdict at Southwark Crown Court earlier this month.
