Year: 2011

Climate & science – Oct 21

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– IEA Sees Dire Future For Climate, Energy Without New Technology
– Global Warming Study Finds No Grounds for Climate Skeptics’ Concerns
– “When politicians distort science” by Robert Socolow (co-author of Wedges proposal)

ODAC Newsletter – Oct 21

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As temperatures dropped in Britain this week, the political heat over rising energy bills intensified. Prime Minister David Cameron hauled in the utility bosses and demanded action. Cameron claimed “everything that can be done will be done to help people bring their energy bills down…

What Occupy Wall Street can learn from the Singing Revolution

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Drawing strength from the rage of the masses is not a formula for longevity, especially in a consumer culture, where rage shifts seasonally…Just ask the veterans of the great uprisings of 1968. We still wonder, what became of our revolution? Rather than being adopted by everyone, it unified the opposition, and while it made some milestones, especially in the popular culture, it missed its political mark by a wide mile.

Energy – Oct 21

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– There Will Be Oil, But At What Price?
– Alms for the Rich: How policies meant to promote alternative energies are actually hurting the middle class
– What Will Turn Us On in 2030? Fossil fuels vs ???
– Australia beats them all – in oil imports

Economic Solutions Worth Spreading

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Radical change is happening. Our goal is to guide that change in a direction that brings shared prosperity and justice for this and future generations. We must shift from an economy based on wasteful use of fossil fuels to one based on the careful stewardship of renewable energy. We must shift from an economy based on depleting our inherited trust fund of natural resources and healthy ecosystems to one based on rebuilding them.

What do you do? Writing on the edge

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We don’t talk much about what we do for a living in Transition. So today I was going to write about the “real world” work some of my fellow Transitioners are engaged in, about being a cook, or market gardener or librarian. Then I thought: why am I not writing about myself trying to make a sustainable livelihood from writing?

Course Review (or why Daniel Yergin needs to do his homework)

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Recently I’ve been getting emails from folks who had previously read an article or two on Peak Oil and found the evidence convincing—but who have more recently encountered a piece or two by Daniel Yergin (or another writer following the same train of thought). Their new line of reasoning goes like this:…Just as “fracking” shale gas has been a “game changer” for the natural gas industry, new technologies for accessing tar sands, oil shale, and shale oil…will change the oil game…Now, every element of that argument has already been dealt with at length in the Energy Realist literature. But occasionally a review of previous course material is called for. So here we go…

The next step in sustainable building: the Passive House

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The world must reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly, in the range of eighty to ninety percent over the next few decades. Every use of energy is now under review, and we are finding that the greatest generators of CO2 are not automobiles and airplanes but buildings. As a result, developers, architects, and planners are looking for ways to build structures that use significantly less energy than even the top-rated “green” buildings of today.

Trouble in the algae lab for Craig Venter and Exxon

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A much-trumpeted partnership of one of today’s most celebrated scientists and the world’s largest publicly traded oil company seems stalled in its aim of creating mass-market biofuel from algae, and may require a new agreement to go forward. The disappointment experienced thus far by scientist J. Craig Venter and ExxonMobil is notable not only because of their stature, but that many experts think that, at least in the medium term, algae is the sole realistically commercial source of biofuel that can significantly reduce U.S. and global oil demand.