Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Brian Czech We can only hope that last week’s edition of The Daly News finds its way into the monetary policy arena, but without the cartoon. Something is very wrong with an image of Herman Daly holding a money bag from which a tree is sprouting. The brainy proportioning of Herman is nicely done, but the relationship between the money bag and the tree is completely backwards.
It is amazing that there always has to be a catastrophe before the media will take up an issue even though we researchers showed that there would be a problem already back in 2003. The question is whether the opportunity now exists to make Peak Oil a global political question?
On a winter’s day in Boston in 1773, a rally of thousands at Faneuil Hall to protest a new British colonial tax levied on tea turned into an iconic moment in the pre-history of the American Revolution. Some of the demonstrators — Sons of Liberty, they called themselves — left the hall and boarded the Dartmouth, a ship carrying tea, and dumped it overboard.
The involvement of the U. S. military in many civilian tasks seems in some ways logical. But that is just the problem. We are shaping public policies and priorities so that the resources to perform these tasks are increasingly unavailable to the civilian federal agencies or to the state and municipal governments responsible for them. Starved of tax revenue or congressional appropriations, these entities have turned to the military for help.
Are there any alternative structures that could allow us to maintain, even dramatically improve our collective quality of life despite an ongoing decline in the quality and availability of energy?
Dr Michael Lardelli from the University of Adelaide looks at how the bulk of the world’s oil production comes from a relatively small number of very large fields discovered decades ago. The rate of world oil production has been maintained at current levels only by finding and bringing on line an increasing number of smaller fields, but the financial cost and the energy required to find and develop these new fields is constantly increasing. According to Dr Lardelli the so-called peak of oil production was actually in 2008.
The dirty secret of wind: utilities don’t like wind not because it’s not competitive, but because it brings prices down for their existing assets, thus lowering their revenues and their profits.
Is Acadiana lost? In truth the Cajuns and their kindred have been losing their idyllic wetlands for decades. Deepwater Horizon may just be the atë, if you will.
As oil companies reported sharply increased profits this week, an estimated 5000 barrels of oil a day was spewing into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. This ecological disaster comes just a month after President Obama gave the green light to expand drilling off the US coast, and while the timing of the disaster could hardly be worse for big oil’s PR…
The news from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is not good. If the NOAA estimates are right about the size of the spill it could dwarf Exxon Valdez…
With BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the news, the world’s interest is now focused on deepwater oil production. BP has another deepwater platform in the Gulf of Mexico—Thunder Horse—where it has been working some for some time. My analysis suggests production is not going well as planned at Thunder Horse.
Is global warming caused by too many people? This begins a series of articles in which Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus shows that population numbers can conceal far more than they reveal.
