Food & agriculture – August 25
-Are food prices approaching a violent tipping point?
-Tesco and Starbucks feel the heat in battle against ‘clone town Britain’
-As Farmers’ Markets Go Mainstream, Some Fear a Glut
Year: 2011
New USGS Marcellus Shale anaylsis drastically cuts DOE estimates
This week the USGS released a new assessment of gas resources in the Marcellus Shale, Appalachian Basin. The rerport is a reasonable effort by the USGS to sort out some of the wheat from the chaff.
How I learned to start worrying and hate the tar sands pipeline
Bill McKibben sure is making a big deal over a commodity piece of oil infrastructure. He and more than 200 climate activists think it’s worth getting arrested to stop TransCanada from building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Sure, tar sands are uber-dirty. But with such a low energy return, won’t high costs just make them go away on their own? That’s what I always assumed. But now I’m starting to think this thing could be bad. Really bad.
The roads to our alternative energy future
How fast do we need to transition off of fossil fuels? What industrial capacity is available today for different alternative energy technologies and what is likely to be available in the future? What might we do if we can’t replace fossil fuels with alternatives fast enough, and what might the consequences be? I finally got around to re-doing these calculations, and wanted to go through the numbers.
Chamber of Commerce response to Rick Munroe’s Review of Index of U.S. Energy Security Risk and author’s reply
Taken as a whole, we believe that our oil metrics do a good job of assessing the totality of oil-related supply and demand risks. We do not expect the Index to be the last word on the topic, and we’re always willing to entertain new data that fit our criteria. The Index was created to provide a framework and a tool for analysts and policymakers. How would peak oil affect U.S. energy security? What would lowered export capacity mean? We hope that we have provided a means to help answer these types of questions.
Mr. Eule concludes his response by asking two very important questions: “How would peak oil affect U.S. energy security? What would lower export capacity mean?” Both issues are vital to our collective future yet they remain largely ignored by our elected officials, government agencies and mainstream media. It is hoped that both the Chamber and the EIA will address these questions in a direct and thorough manner in subsequent publications.
Michele Bachmann Petroleum Geologist
Rep. Michele Bachmann, a lawyer now turned petroleum geologist, announced to a South Carolina crowd recently, “Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again. The day that President Obama became president,” she said, “gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. Look what it is today.”
Don’t defend the university, transform it!
The future of the university hangs in the balance and the instinct to defend it against a wholesale attack seems to be an obvious response. But what is it that so many rush to defend? Could it be that rather than seize our placard shields, we should instead rejoice in the downfall of the institution? Or should we perhaps seize this opportunity to search for ways to re-imagine the university and radically transform its inner workings, to look at the actual functioning of the university, to question the kind of subjects it produces and the form of market-led ‘common sense’ that it reproduces?
Living disconnected
I thought it might be useful to try to describe how the Internet might stumble, try to adapt, and finally fall under a collapse scenario, and what that would mean for us as we make our way through the energy, ecological and economic crises ahead.
Low Carbon and Economic Growth: Are both compatible in developing economies?
At the intersection of global energy depletion and concerns about human impact on the environment lie some serious and oft overlooked issues. Largely gone from our public discourse is the idea that oil is infinite. It is now accepted, even to previous staunch cornucopians, that increasing, or even maintaining oil production will come only at higher costs. The new response to the energy/environmental crisis is to transition to a green economy, replacing our declining stocks of fossil sunlight with new technologies able to harness our current sunlight in its various forms. That these renewable technologies are available, viable and becoming more popular is not in question – however, whether these low carbon strategies can combine with now more expensive fossil fuels to maintain a growth trajectory for both the developed and developing worlds is another question entirely.
Bill Gates wants to solve the poop problem
Why don’t all of us country people (and I’m thinking especially of the imaginative and innovative readers of this blog) amuse ourselves by designing, and perhaps even building, the MOST COMFORTABLE OUTHOUSE IN THE WORLD. I am talking about an outhouse that even the Queen of England would die to have in her backyard. Can you imagine how we could change our cultural attitude toward shit with a photo of the Queen seated on her plush satin-covered outhouse throne, with a shining little cut glass chandelier overhead, surrounded by richly brocaded interior walls and exterior walls of beautiful soapstone?
An Elegy for the Age of Space
One of the most difficult challenges of the age of peak oil is the need to retool our dreams and visions to deal with the consequences of the misguided decisions of recent decades. The end of America’s space shuttle program, which in all probability amounts to the end of its manned presence in space, demands a look at one of the more popular modern dreams — a dream that will never become real. The Archdruid explains.
Sneak Peak: Oil Age Presentation Script
Nearly everyone would agree that we live in uncertain, challenging times. It seems that so much is happening so fast that it’s almost impossible to make sense of it all. We’re clearly on some kind of trajectory, but a trajectory toward what?
