Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – NYT: Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
– NG industry tried to get “Gasland” doc disqualified from Oscars
– Lower second tier oil producers – Norway, Brazil, Iraq and Algeria
– How the U.S. may win the battery race
– New book from WebHubbleTelescope: “The Oil ConunDRUM”
Only two years ago Chesapeake Energy Corp. president Aubrey McClendon was telling us about the limitless future of natural gas in North America. It is a good thing that McClendon, who still runs Chesapeake, isn’t taking his own advice these days.
– Libya celebrates as Gaddafi’s remote strongholds rise against him
– Building a new Libya
– Britain and Libya: “No line in the sand”
– The Vacuum After Qaddafi
This then represents the end of the historical epoch I have chosen to call the Age of Frontiers, which we can date from 1492 to 2006. Although there are still other, smaller frontiers that will continue to be exploited, none is large enough or expanding quickly enough to offset the effects of the closing of the oil frontier. We are in a new age now, one for which we don’t have a map or blueprint, and for which the assumptions about how the world works that we have taken for granted all our lives will be inadequate.
– David Strahan: Oil price set to double if production is cut off
– NYT: A Tipping Point for Oil Prices
– Tverberg: WSJ, Financial Times Raise Issue of Oil Prices Causing Recession
– 350.org: Implementing local solutions, one neighborhood at a time.
– Totnes: Britain’s town of the future
– One on One: Jane McGonigal, (Peak Oil) Game Designe
– Will Carbon Nation succeed where An Inconvenient Truth failed?
– Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (RSA video)
Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s threat to fight to the death rather than cede power set off a rising tide of violence this week which has seen hundreds, maybe thousands killed. The future of the regime and the country still hangs in the balance. The growing chaos has also spread to Libya’s oil industry as companies shut down production and foreign workers flee.
Local communities that depend on Darjeeling’s delicate but rich natural environment will either benefit from its preservation or suffer from its degradation. Conservation efforts that ignore economic realities and the role of community institutions miss opportunities to provide incentives for environmental preservation.
In a world of blatantly increasing food insecurity — driven by population, dietary trends, rising oil prices, and growing climate instability — America’s policy of burning one third of our corn crop in our engines (soon to be 37% or more) is becoming increasingly untenable, if not unconscionable.
What we have learned from past oil shocks (which few people outside the peak oil community have chosen to recognize) is pretty clear and simple – that the effect of oil on the economy, on individual lives, on the world as a whole is dramatically greater than can be expected by a direct arithmetical progression – that is, the effect of oil on whole systems is something like a geometric progression, increasing in complexity and impact well beyond what one would intuitively expect.
Social, political, demographic, and other conditions in Libya are significantly different than in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain or elsewhere, so it is not surprising that the progress of the revolution has differed too.
“We demand that before the hard-working, tax-paying families of this country are once again forced to sacrifice, the corporations who have so richly profited from our labor, our patronage, and our bailouts be compelled to pay their taxes and contribute their fair share to the continued prosperity of our nation. We will organize, we will mobilize, and we will NOT be quiet!”
