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Fort Collins Clean Energy Conference hosts RFK Jr.
Rocky Radar (California’s Technology Radar)
On Monday evening the Clean Energy Conference was held in Fort Collins, featuring a distinguished panel of speakers including German Member of Parliament Dr. Hermann Scheer and the environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The event, organized by local entrepreneur Katie Hoffner, was put together in a short time frame but still managed to attract over 500 participants to the Hilton ballroom.
Anita Burke of the Catalyst Institute was the first speaker of the evening. Burke, a physicist and eighteen year veteran of Shell International, opened by offering that she had worked in the “bowels of the oil and gas industry” and was appearing to provide some context to globe’s environmental crisis. According to Burke, the Earth is guaranteed a four degree rise in temperature, “even if we ‘full stop’ producing carbon today.” She offered a definition of peak oil –the point at which maximum petroleum extraction is reached, after which production begins terminal decline – and maintains the oil and gas industry is near or at this mark. Burke then presented a quick succession of slides that demonstrated an explosion of global consumption since 1950, from oil to international tourism to paper to the number of McDonalds restaurants. For Burke, this pattern of consumption is leading to “peak everything” and requires bold action, including the elimination of automobiles, stabilization and reduction of the population, an immediate 80% reduction in carbon emissions, and the construction of dykes on our shores reaching two meters above sea level. While predicting a certain level of ecological catastrophe in the coming years, Burke maintains that as a country we are “on the precipice of making elegant choices.”
(15 April 2009)
The 2009 EIA Energy Conference: Day 2
Robert Rapier, The Oil Drum
Energy and the Media
This was the panel I had been asked to participate in. My fellow panelists were Steven Mufson (one of my favorite mainstream energy reporters), from the Washington Post; Eric Pooley from Harvard, (the former managing editor of Fortune); and Barbara Hagenbaugh from USA Today. The panel was moderated by John Anderson of Resources for the Future.
I can only imagine that a number of people looked at the lineup, looked at my inclusion, and thought “What’s that guy doing up there?” So here’s the background on that. When I was working at the ConocoPhillips Refinery in Billings, Montana, we followed the weekly release of the EIA’s Weekly Petroleum Status Report very closely. We included this information in a weekly supply/demand report, and it helped us to make decisions on how to run the refinery for the upcoming week.
When I started my blog, I began to follow and report on the weekly inventory release, which happens on Wednesday mornings and is followed in the afternoon by This Week in Petroleum. Professor Goose liked the weekly reports and asked me to bring them over here to The Oil Drum. This all helped drive more traffic to the EIA website, and helped more people come to appreciate the value of the EIA data.
(16 April 2009)
Total, the ‘peak oil’ believer’s favourite IOC
Kate Mackenzie, Financial Times
Total, the French oil company, has not shied away from the controversial topic of how much more oil can be extracted from the world’s reserves, at least in a technically and economically feasible way.
Michel Mallet, head of Total’s business in Germany, in an interview with Der Spiegel, says he walks to work and that realistic production capacity is less than 105m barrels per day. There is plenty of oil, he says, but the question is how fast it can be produced. He also talks about the risk of underinvestment in oil production leading to an oil price shock, and the difficulties in getting drilling licences in some oil-producing countries.
(16 April 2009)
What kind of fuel can I – afford in days to come? (video)
versusplus, YouTube
A musical parody of the Briscusse/Newley song “What Kind of Fool Am I,” about oil and gas. For “ALL PUMPED UP” and many more great political musical parodies, visit VERSUS — where politics and culture do their time in rhyme — at http://versusplus.com.
(October 18, 2007)
Suggested by reader Kathy Cumbee.
Further Evidence of the Influence of Energy on the U.S. Economy
EROI Guy, The Oil Drum: Net Energy
Gail, Jeff Rubin , and now James Hamilton (warning- pdf) of the University of California – San Diego have produced literature correlating either this financial collapse or recessions more generally with peak oil and oil prices. The take-away message of their work is that oil prices played a fundamental role in causing the current recession and many previous recessions. In this post I, along with Steve Balogh, a fellow researcher here at the EROI Institute at SUNY-ESF, will add to this discourse.
In his recent report, James Hamilton states that: “…a low price elasticity of demand, and the failure of physical production [of oil] to increase…, rather than speculation, are the primary cause of the oil shock of 2007-08.”
Hamilton continues:
At a minimum it is clear that something other than housing deteriorated to turn slow growth into a recession. That something, in my mind, includes the collapse in automobile purchases, slowdown in overall consumption spending, and deteriorating consumer sentiment, in which the oil shock was indisputably a contributing factor…Eventually, the declines in income and house prices set mortgage delinquency rates beyond a threshold at which the overall solvency of the financial system itself came to be questioned…had there been no oil shock, we would have described the U.S. economy in 2007:Q4-2008:Q3 as growing slowly, but not in a recession.
Hamilton acknowledges early on in his report that the proportion of income spent on energy is an important determinant of consumer spending patterns. The theory is fairly simple: if energy expenditures rise faster than income, then the share of income for other things besides purchasing energy must decline, such as spending on mortgage payments for a second home in Las Vegas. In other words, rapid, large increases in energy prices may curtail consumption enough to trigger larger financial problems – like the bursting of a housing bubble – that when aggregated across an economy may cause or contribute significantly to a recession.
(16 April 2009)
Real GDP and the Oil Shock of 2007-08
Dave Cohen, ASPO-USA
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands
—Douglas Adams
Dr. James Hamilton (JDH) recently released his study Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08. The paper concludes that if the oil price shock that started in 2007 and ended after 2008:Q2 had not occurred, the U.S. economy would have been described as growing slowly in 2007:Q4-2008:Q3. Here is JDH’s conclusion and the main result…
…Hamilton is making a subtle point by examining a counterfactual proposition. Imagine there had been no oil shock in 2007Q:3-08:H1. In this case Hamilton believes that the U.S. economy would have been “growing slowly” during the period in question. This point is confusing because our economy was growing slowly as measured by real GDP (+0.7 or 0.8 percent as shown in Hamilton’s Table 3, and discussed on page 34). JDH’s point is that without the oil shock, our economy would have been seen as growing at a slightly faster rate than the data shows—declining light truck sales provide empirical support for this view (see the last section below). Hamilton says his conclusion is one “that I don’t fully believe myself.”
(16 April 2009)
