Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Craig K. Comstock Crude oil in the gulf yields good TV images, but BP and its contractors have untapped a geyser not only of oil, but of methane–more than 20 time as effective as CO2 at holding heat. The percentage of the gush that’s methane is roughly estimated at 40-50%, subject to verification.
In the last few years, scientists have begun to look at whether consumption of renewable resources follows Hubbert’s model. So how useful is the concept of “peak water”?
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”.
It’s been nearly 5 months since I started DOTE. The traffic stats are very encouraging. The number of visitors has increased almost every week during that whole period, although there has been a great deal of volatility. But DOTE is still a minor league blog, and will remain so for some time to come. I am about halfway to my initial goal of 1000 real visitors a day (as measured by Google Analytics).
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…
President Obama triumphantly entered office with the popular promise of moving the United States to a cleaner energy basis, but his actions to date, along with those of the Congress, have promoted two types of dangerous energy developments: off-shore oil drilling and nuclear reactors. Nuclear expert Harvey Wasserman highlighted the dual dangers by noting, “As BP’s ghastly gusher assaults the Gulf of Mexico, a tornado has forced a shutdown of the Fermi 2 atomic reactor at the site of a 1966 melt-down that nearly irradiated the entire Great Lakes Region.”
With the BP Horizon Blowout, we may be hitting a turning point in belief systems, in more than one way:
• Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?
• Can technology solve all our problems?
• If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?
• Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is here?
Boy am I ever humbled to have been featured in the New York Times story ‘Imagining life without oil, and being ready.’
The ongoing economic collapse will not reach completion while the television remains on. Viewers are simply too easily and chronically manipulated by the irresistible medium. Resistance is futile.
In a world where energy supplies are much more constrained than most international agencies assume, it is almost certain that refrigerated shipping will be too costly and energy intensive for many people – thus, the industrialized and centralized meat industry that we’ve created is not likely to be a long term success.
We’re caught in a vicious circle: The more we’re concerned with money, the less time we have for others (making and managing money takes time). When we’re mainly concerned with money, others are our adversaries — we’re all competing for limited resources.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
– Oil and the Global Economy
– The impacts of Deepwater horizon
– Briefs
