Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Cries in the Dark
Neil King Jr., Wall Street Journal
How serious is America’s energy crisis? These four voices want to make sure policymakers don’t dismiss it — again.
—
After each [oil shock in the past], voices in Washington that cried out for big changes in U.S. energy policy were slowly drowned out. James Schlesinger, the first U.S. energy secretary, has said for decades that when it comes to energy policy, the U.S. toggles between complacency and panic.
Will it be different this time around?
… From the Pentagon to Capitol Hill, some often lonely voices are warning of big shocks to come if the U.S. doesn’t wake up.
… Mr. Peak Oil
Back in the halcyon days of March 2005, when oil was at $54 a barrel, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett stood on the House floor to give the first of many lonely speeches.
The Maryland Republican — son of a tenant farmer, holder of 30 patents, trained physiologist, former dairy farmer — knew the speech would win neither votes nor applause from the commuters and farmers who populate his district. But he had a message to impart: The world has less and less oil to offer, he told the near-empty House chamber. The age of cheap energy is ending. And if the U.S. didn’t start adapting, it was in for a shock.
… Rep. Bartlett is Mr. Peak Oil in the U.S. Congress, which also makes him perhaps the loudest energy-shock spokesman on Capitol Hill. Every few weeks, Rep. Bartlett hauls his thick stack of huge charts — around 30 in all — over to the House floor for his after-hours lecture for the viewers of C-Span. In the past three years, he has lectured the nation 42 times on how ebbing oil supplies will bring a big jolt to the U.S. economy.
… James Woolsey, a Beltway Democrat-turned-Republican, is plotting to go “off-grid” and tools around town in a plug-in hybrid with a bumper sticker that says “Osama Bin Laden Hates This Car.”
CIA director under President Clinton and President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of the navy, Mr. Woolsey is himself a hybrid: part switchgrass-loving hipster and part national-security hawk who backed the Iraq invasion and considers Saudi Arabia to be a promoter of Islamic extremism.
… Alexander “Andy” Karsner, the Bush administration’s assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy …
Mr. Karsner, a former CEO of energy consulting firm Enercorp., takes a far gloomier view than most within the Energy Department on the challenges the country faces. When he looks over the horizon, he sees slumping oil supplies and soaring demand. “This isn’t fusion,” he says of the world’s reliance on crude. “This is a finite resource.”
… For a man with a disturbing message, Robert Hirsch couldn’t be milder. Crisp, perfectly combed, monotone in delivery, the former nuclear engineer reminds one of a retired MIT professor kicking back on his Cape Cod porch.
But Mr. Hirsch has become a prophet of sorts for the country’s growing legions of peak-oil converts who know him mainly as the lead author of the 2005 Hirsch Report. The actual title of the 91-page tome, ordered up but then shunted aside by the Energy Department, he says, was “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management.”
Jim Slutz, acting deputy assistant secretary for fossil energy, says the study was never meant to represent the views of the DOE and was taken out of context by peak-oil adherents.
… Mr. Hirsch says he has learned a few things since the report came out.
For one, he has revamped his view that the world would hit a sharp peak in production, followed by rapid output declines. Instead, like many in the industry itself, he says world-wide oil production will stick to a sustained plateau — driving up prices as demand continues to rise. “We have already been on a plateau for sometime,” he says.
He also learned that the Bush administration wasn’t very keen to hear his gloomy message on long-term oil supplies. “The message came from DOE headquarters that we could work on ramification issues but not on peak oil itself,” he said. There are now signs — among them the bracing views of Mr. Karsner at the DOE — that the administration is leaning toward a less rosy view of the world’s energy outlook.
(30 June 2008)
At the moment, the article is publicly accessible. If it is behind a paywall, you can get to the original by going through Google News. -BA
Discussion with Matt Simmons (video)
Richard J. Loomis, World Energy Television
World Energy recently spent an afternoon with Matthew Simmons to hear his perspective on oil supplies, pump prices, distributed generation and a return to post-World War II practices. Watch now
(June 2008)
Long interview in which Simmons seems more relaxed than usual. A press release summarizes the interview. Simmons favors coal-powered power plants, believing that generating adequate electricity is more important than reducing GHGs. -BA
James and the Giant Breach
An interview with author James Howard Kunstler
Michelle Nijhuis, Grist
Author and social critic James Howard Kunstler, known for predicting our post-peak-oil future in nonfiction works such as The Long Emergency, has also brought his forecasts to life through fiction. His newest novel, World Made By Hand, describes the near future in a small town in upstate New York — not unlike the place Kunstler himself lives today — where a chain of global crises has forced the community to fend for itself.
Despite the tragedy and violence that surround his characters, Kunstler says his vision of the future isn’t nearly as grim as it might seem. “I resent the idea that I’m an apocalyptarian,” he says. “I’m describing changes that we face, but I’m hardly proposing that it’s the end of the world. It may be the end of the Wal-Mart experience, it may be the end of see-the-USA-in-your-Chevrolet — but that ain’t the end of the world.”
Grist recently spoke with Kunstler about prophesying — and preparing for — life after Wal-Mart.
Q: So you’ve wrestled with peak oil, climate change, and disease in nonfiction books. Why did you decide to address them in a novel?
Kunstler: I wanted to present a very vivid experience for readers, so they could feel what it might be like, sense what it might be like, to live in this post-oil world — a world in which the tyranny of automobiles is over with, and people are living very directly with the planet and each other. The whole issue of farming and food production comes closer to the center of life, with all of its practical requirements and ceremonies. When you’re living in that kind of economy, your society tends to follow the seasons, and a lot of the social content of everyday life is geared to planting, harvesting, and tending — it’s very different from the electronically mediated world of cubicle work.
(30 June 2008)
