Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb “Don’t waste your breath” needs to become a mantra in the peak oil and sustainability communities. The season for arguing with peak oil and climate change deniers has long since passed. Our time is too precious and the need to act too urgent. The time has come for talkin’ triage.
– The Money Fix – documentary now online
– Tim Jackson’s Economic Reality Check
– Currency wars are necessary if all else fails
The industry is rapidly becoming a major industrial sector of its own. It is rapidly transforming from an experimental sub-sector into one of the largest infrastructure building activities in Europe, with a soon-to-be-macro impact on energy geopolitics. The regulatory process drives everything. First, the economics need to make sense. Second, the permitting process needs to be understandable and stable.
We have seen a surge of interest and concern from military analysts on the issue of future oil supply, especially during the past five years. Unfortunately, there is very little evidence of concern about peak oil (and therefore no action) from civilian authorities, despite the accelerating trends and increasing warnings from credible military researchers.
One reason that we may abandon a technology is that the costs outweigh the benefits. Thus the fridge has been abandoned because the cost of maintaining it outweighs the benefit of keeping lunch cold. Other reasons might be that the technology is no longer supportable (for example, if you cannot access fuel, your car is not going anywhere) or another technology appears/reappears to replace it. In this post, I would like to propose a theory by which some, or potentially many, modern technologies could be abandoned. This is an important issue because of its implications for government policy, business investment and of course society as a whole.
– Report for New Zealand Parliament: Dwindling Oil Supplies threaten economies
– Excerpt from NZ report “The next oil shock?”
– U.S. Congressional Briefing: Can Oil Production Meet Rising Demand?
– “Disaster on the Horizon” – new book on the Gulf oil spill
– Thomas Friedman: Build ‘Em And They Will Come
– Pentagon going green, because it has to
– US to Probe China’s Green-Tech Trade Policies
In an age when wealth and power present a more diffuse and benign face to the world, the soft authority of knowledge is ever more important as a force for social change. The politics of knowledge – how ideas are created, used and disseminated – represents a key issue for the social change community.
The US administration ended its moratorium on deepwater drilling this week seven weeks ahead of schedule. The lifting of the ban – put in place in the wake of the BP Macondo oil well explosion – was greeted with muted enthusiasm from the oil industry…
The world watched last year’s climate talks in Copenhagen with hope and trepidation. We spent the past two weeks following the ICAO Assembly, the aviation sector’s climate talks in Montreal with equal anticipation. Unlike Copenhagen, there was little coverage, and very limited civil society participation. And now that it’s over, despite most partiescalling it a success, we have to conclude that it’s bad news.
Hermann Scheer, one of the world’s leading advocates for solar power, has died at the age of sixty-six. The German economist and politician helped make Germany a renewable energy powerhouse and inspired many across the world to expand the use of solar power. We met up with Herman Scheer last month in Bonn, Germany, for what turned out to be one of his final interviews. [video and rush transcript]
The hard news is that there is no “Plan B.” The future is likely to be more chaotic than you probably think. This was the primary conclusion that I came to after attending the most recent Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) in Washington, DC in October, 2010.
