Year: 2011

Blazing Brazilian biofuel beatdown

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The Food and Agriculture Organization will have a new director-general, José Graziano da Silva. Among Graziano’s accomplishments is the Zero Hunger programme, which has been partly responsible for getting 40 million people out of hunger. But you don’t get to run an international organisation without the support of your home country, and you don’t get that support in Brazil without deep debts to agribusiness. At his first press conference, Graziano started to pay them off, announcing that biofuels should not be “demonised” for their role in driving up food prices. That this contradicts the latest evidence is only surprising for as long as it takes to remember quite how big Brazil’s biofuel industry is.

Wales: a Co-operative nation?

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We are living in an important historical moment. The last time we saw an economic collapse on this scale it took the dislocation and suffering of the 1930s and the Second World War to put the uncontrolled market back into its box and the tensions in the Eurozone are indications of the sorts of passions that result from economic failure provoked by selfishness and greed.

Energy: Making sense of peak oil and energy uncertainty

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There are currently no viable substitutes for oil at current rates of consumption.  Although alternatives to oil do exist for many of its uses, they are generally vastly inferior to oil in their energy content and in the ease of which they can be extracted, transported, and turned into a commercially-useable fuel.

Bigger farms, bigger headaches

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It took three 150 hp plus tractors, two backhoes and a bulldozer to finally free the rig. In the process three pull chains, each with 55,000 pound pulling capacity, snapped in one awesome surge of assembled horsepower. The country road alongside the field looked like a superhighway as the local population drove by to enjoy the show.

OPEC spare capacity, rig count and the big picture

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There has been much speculation on these blog pages about the existence of OPEC spare capacity. The oil rig count for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Qatar (SKAQ) provides some clues. The sharp rise in operational oil rigs in February 2011 suggests to us that usable spare capacity does not exist and that new useful capacity (light sweet?) must be built by drilling new wells. This takes time. It also suggests that there is goodwill among these OPEC members to try and boost supply to tame oil prices.

Reducing food waste: Making the most of our abundance

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According to staggering new statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), roughly one-third of the food produced worldwide for human consumption is lost or wasted, amounting to some 1.3 billion tons per year. In the developing world, over 40 percent of food losses occur after harvest—while being stored or transported, and during processing and packing. In industrialized countries, more than 40 percent of losses occur as a result of retailers and consumers discarding unwanted but often perfectly edible food.

Can biomass help phase out coal?

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If biomass can help power plant owners ease away from coal faster, that is certainly a good thing. The Dominion announcement is particularly relevant given the number of planned plant retirements in the coal industry – there are currently 190 generators around the U.S. set to be shut down, and there’s a dwindling appetite to replace them with more coal.

Transition and “activism’s” edge

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I don’t think we’re really going to understand this friction between, and the potential energy arising from, transition and “activism/action” unless the latter term gets further granularity. “Transition justice” is a new term and probably means different things to everyone. How this gets woven explicitly into the framing of Transition is a question we’ve not answered yet. But at least we’re asking that question.