Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gene Logsdon They are determined to believe, along with their university and USDA partners, that they are controlling erosion simply because they quit using moldboard plows and use no-till planters. The pretension reaches hilariously ludicrous proportions.
At the end of February, The Oil Drum published an article I wrote called Efficiency and Resilience: After Jevons Paradox, the Piggy Principle. Its content was a strictly theoretical discussion of energy efficiency and its impact on the consumption and resilience of societies.
Conventional crude production – Latest figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that crude oil production including lease condensates decreased by 107,000 b/d from February to March 2010, resulting in total production of crude oil including lease condensates of 73.41 million b/d.
Last night’s presidential speech on the Gulf oil spill had been pre-billed by the Washington Post as Barack Obama’s “Jimmy Carter moment.” But reading any of Carter’s speeches (a good one to start with is that of April 18, 1977) side by side with last night’s bromide is an invitation to nostalgia and bitter disappointment.
So here I am. I fully intended to be giving the England match my full attention right now, but I’ve been left distinctly restive by this afternoon’s long session by Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth, and feel the need to put some thoughts down.
In the first post of this series, I mentioned my initial encounter with winemaking and wine drinking on an island in Lake Erie, after which I read anything and everything I could find about wine. One of the first books I read was Leon D. Adams’ The Wines of America, a book long since out of print. While reading it, I was very surprised to learn that Ohio was once the leading wine producing state!
After 17 months in office, it now seems clear that the Obama administration is not going to confront the peak oil issue straight on, unless absolutely necessary. Like the Bush administration, the hope remains that gas prices will remain affordable and economy-disabling oil shortages will not develop until after the administration leaves office.
“If we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction—if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs—we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.”
–President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010
The most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military — and its military adventure in Afghanistan — when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. Successive American administrations have blindly headed down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin.
In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous “Jack” oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data – people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil – five miles down underneath the ocean…Darley, framing the issue brilliantly, observed that “this isn’t salvation, this is digging around in the couch cushions for loose change.”
There’s a dream I keep having. Maybe you’ve been having it too — in some form, at least. Or maybe it’s real; maybe we’re living it. It’s getting harder to tell these days, huh? In any case, it’s not a good dream. And it’s not over. It goes like this…
A few weeks ago, the sustainability media outlet treehugger.com ran an article titled “Is Biodynamic and Organic Wine Still Green If It Is Shipped Halfway Around The World?” Author Lloyd Alter discusses the carbon footprint of wine shipped from different parts of the world and questions whether wine shipped from such far-off places as Australia, even if it’s grown “organically,” can be considered “green”.
