Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rick Munroe This article was inspired by the disjuncture between a UK government document which reveals the stunning decline in UK oil production, as opposed to British media inattention to this worrisome development.
In an excellent short essay, “What Hath Fracking Wrought,” Randy Udall discusses the environmental and social consequences of the application of hydraulic fracturing technology to the production of oil and natural gas.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Iranian confrontation
-Gasoline and the US economy
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
You may say you want a revolution, but generally you don’t. Predictably, fracking—the high-pressure injection of massive amounts of water, sand, and toxic chemicals a mile underground, a technology first developed to unlock Rockies tight gas—has sparked controversy.
It is always impossible to distinguish between weather and climate, and I’m not making any claims here, other than humorous ones about my laundry. It is hard for a gardener like me not to be gleeful in some measure – I have daffodils, warm dirt, tiny spinach leaves, baby rabbits, clean laundry – what’s not to love?…But just like there’s some vague part of me that worries when the laundry pile gets empty – it is nice, but not NORMAL at my house, it is hard to love with a whole heart this world, whether this warming is momentary or meaningful. The long term predictions for my place echo in my head – like Georgia, only drier, by the end of the century. If we aren’t having a Georgia spring, we are certainly having a Virginia one, and isn’t without consequence.
-U.S. intelligence sees global water conflict risks rising
-Reflections on a Thirsty Planet for World Water Day
-Las Vegas plans to pump water across 300 miles of desert approved
-China plans to curb capital’s water usage
-The Colorado River delta blues
Architects all over the world have demonstrated the usefulness of buildings which are heated and cooled by design rather than by fossil fuel energy. What has received much less attention, however, is the possibility of applying this approach to entire urban neighbourhoods and cities.
I recently argued that today’s global marketplace is characterized by cheater economics — a corporate welfare system that has no part in a sustainable, steady state economy. There’s another type of economics that’s also in wide use today. It’s not quite as “in-your-face” as cheater economics, but it’s just as harmful because of the way it distorts reality. Deceptionomics uses “fool-you” accounting to omit genuine costs and misrepresent the true benefits and costs of economic transactions.
This online tool allows you to estimate the number of people a certain area in Australia may be able to support at a national, state and bio-regional scale. Our aim is to raise awareness of the importance of carrying capacity assessment as a forward planning tool – to help establish a sustainable balance between people and their localised environment. Given the dependence of societal systems on biophysical health, it is vital that land-use planning initiatives have the ability to more clearly define potential future demands on the environment. Carrying capacity assessment offers a way to assess our resource needs and also determine how best to meet these needs.
Mr. Speaker, when I looked at the television this morning and at that little crawler across the top of one of our stations, I noticed that oil was $103 a barrel–$103 a barrel and we’re in a recession. What’s happening here?
Today, in spite of all that we have done in the most creative, innovative society in the world, the United States, today we produce half the oil that we did in 1970, and we’ve drilled more oil wells in our country than all the rest of the world put together.
If you have the power and the desire to bring down oil prices, the best way to proceed is to start bringing them down. The easiest and fastest method would be to make more supplies available to the world market and keep adding until you reach your target price. The less you say about what you are doing, the better. When market participants are filled with uncertainty about your intentions, they have only the direction of prices to guide them. That means the speculative players can help you achieve your goals more quickly as they panic out of their positions.
This was not, of course, the path chosen by the United States, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia recently when they announced that they were contemplating intervention in the oil markets–in the form of releases from strategic petroleum reserves in the case of the United States and Britain and in the form of increased production by Saudi Arabia.
The New York Times has shown that it is not concerned about Peak Oil. On 23 March it headed page 1 with an article that reminds us that since Nixon’s time every president has had the same goal of giving the USA “independence from foreign energy sources”. One can interpret the article as saying that the USA is now on the way to reaching this goal but let us compare some of the statements in the article to what the USA’s Energy Information Agency (EIA) says.
