Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tom Murphy With the exception of tidal energy, our focus thus far has been on land-based energy sources. Meanwhile, the ocean absorbs a prodigious fraction of the Sun’s incident energy, creating thermal gradients, currents, and waves whipped up by winds. Let’s put some scales on the energetics of these sources and see if we may turn to them for help. We’ve got our three boxes ready: abundant, potent, and niche (puny). Time to do some sorting!
Here is one more thing for those of us who live in the northeastern U.S. to start worrying about – the refineries that make our gasoline, diesel, heating oil, etc. are dropping like flies.
In today’s economy, these refineries are simply losing so much money that their owners who are not major oil companies that make billions from oil production are having put them up for sale or close them down.
Giving false hope, Obama claimed several times last year that U.S. oil extraction was at an all-time high, when actually it’s in a long-term decline. Whatever people say about the future, at least I hope we can be honest about the past, and put our current position in a long-term perspective. That’s not too much to hope for, is it?
Michael Mandlebaum argues in The Frugal Superpower that the US is too cash-strapped to continue its interventionist stance. He advises cutting oil dependence.
Caring about the air, water, and land that give us life. Exploring ways to ensure Canada’s natural resources serve the national interest. Knowing that sacrificing our environment to a corporate-controlled economy is suicide. If those qualities make us radicals, as federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver recently claimed in an open letter, then I and many others will wear the label proudly.
-Shale Gas a Bridge to More Global Warming
-REPORT: Venting and Leaking of Methane from Shale Gas Development:
Response to Cathles et al.
-Dueling Research: Fracked Shale Gas Worse For Climate Change Than Coal! Or, The Opposite!
Animals are great to talk to. They can be trusted to keep any secret, will not point out to you embarrassing contradictions of logic in your arguments, and they never argue back. They just nod and keep on eating. They will only interrupt your flow of brilliant reasoning if they run out of food.
-Fossil fuels are sub-prime assets, Bank of England governor warned
-The real beneficiaries of energy subsidies
-Podcast: How Equity and Economics Will Drive Climate and Energy Stories in 2012
-Companies and tax authorities can all benefit if they work together
Few debates illustrate the messy nature of North America’s energy politics better than the postponement of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Occasionally, the troubled story of Alfred Wegener’s theory has been perversely appropriated by climate deniers to claim that they are discriminated by the scientific establishment. But that only shows that climate deniers don’t understand how science works.
– Could Ecuador Be the Most Radical and Exciting Place on Earth?
– El Mundo: Cómo bajar de marcha sin perder el tren
– Le “Peak Everything” (ou la fin des haricots)
It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil, and policies to mitigate these two challenges.
