Ezra Klein

Peak oil – May 18

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Dave Hughes’s guide to the end of the fossil fuel age
Byron King: Buckle your seat belts — investment earthquake in the energy sector ahead
A maverick’s message on oil (Jeff Rubin)
Plateau theory drives Total to oil sands
Brain power can meet the energy crisis

Book review: Right Relationship Building a Whole Earth Economy

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“Right Relationship” is a book for the worrying-about-collapse weary. It is a book for those of us who realize the world we live in is in great peril and that something fundamental has to change to ensure the human story continues and flourishes. The book arises from a Quaker tradition which has had remarkable successes in the past – the abolition of slavery being only one noteworthy example.

Commentary: The Great Divide on Energy Policy

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At the 2009 Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston two weeks ago, the top issues revolved around policy questions more than technology, such as drilling the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and climate change legislation. I saw little in the way of progress, however.

Oil sands and our future pensions

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“Swesif”, Sweden’s Forum for Sustainable Investment, had invited me to a symposium on “Tar sands – an ethical pitfall?” The reason for the discussion on tar sands is that Norway’s Statoil is going to invest huge amounts into the tar sands and Swedish pension funds are investors in Statoil. My task was to describe the role of Canada’s tar sands in the global energy system and to discuss the significance of tar sands for global energy supply.

The freedom lobby

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If you want the freedom to be thirsty or to be hungry or to be hopelessly flooded out of your home near the ocean, you can join the freedom lobby and enjoy a few more years or perhaps even a decade or two of huffing and puffing at the imaginary enemies of freedom before the real basis of your freedom, an intact and functioning nation and community, starts to degrade inexorably.

As you go out into the world…

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[to the graduating class] I have been chosen to give you your very last bit of wisdom, something to carry with you into the future. So here is the sum total of that wisdom

“Everything you have been taught to expect is wrong.”

Unfortunately, that isn’t a joke. You have been taken in by a host of assumptions that are not true, and if you walk out of here believing what you have been told and taught over the last four years, you will leave woefully unprepared for you. The consolation, I can offer you, however, is that while what you have been taught to expect is wrong, the things you have actually learned may be of more use than you think.