Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We’re not talking about slamming the brakes on fossil fuels. Even as our contribution to creating Peak Oil awareness begins to see a little light (at least in some circles), I am concerned that we will be so worried about saving our own bacon or appearing to be rational that we will fail to take posterity into account. If we are to save just a little oil for our children, we need to just plain stop using oil (gas, coal).
-UK ministers ignored ‘peak oil’ warnings, report shows
-Senate Rejects Effort to Cut Ethanol Subsidy
-Soot, smog curbs quick way to combat warming: U.N. study
A veteran anti-corporate campaigner, Michael Brune is not your ordinary environmentalist. And now that’s he’s in charge, America’s oldest and largest green group is no longer your father’s Sierra Club. So it’s no surprise that his book “Coming Clean,” re-released after the Deepwater Horizon spill, presents peak oil as a major energy challenge. But as a big fan of the green economy, Brune is more optimistic than many peak oil writers about the ability of solar, wind and other renewables to replace oil and coal. Is he right?
I’m not popular with environmentalists when I tell them that renewables can only provide a small fraction of the energy that fossil fuels do in powering industrial civilization. In fact, I was recently called a liar at the screening of an anti-nuke film for suggesting so.
Here’s one simple fact without which our deepening energy crisis makes no sense: the world economy is structured in such a way that standing still in energy production is not an option. In order to satisfy the staggering needs of older industrial powers like the United States along with the voracious thirst of rising powers like China, global energy must grow substantially every year. Even if usage grows somewhat more slowly than projected, any failure to satisfy the world’s requirements produces a perception of scarcity, which also means rising fuel prices. These are precisely the conditions we see today and should expect for the indefinite future. It is against this backdrop that three crucial developments of 2011 are changing the way we are likely to live on this planet for the foreseeable future.
The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.
Current climate and energy policy debates in the United States rarely involve historians. If you search the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 synthesis report, you will not find the words history or historical. Even so, history pervades climate and energy policy discussions. History guides policy choices, inspires proposals for action, and structures institutional development.
There was a step forward this week for recognition of peak oil in the UK political agenda. Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has agreed that the Department for Energy and Climate Change and ITPOES (UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security) should work more closely together on peak-oil threat assessment and contingency planning.
– British Government Faces Up To Peak Oil
– Fukushima nuclear plant is leaking like a sieve
– U.S. Suit Sees Manipulation of Oil Trades
– China’s Utilities Cut Energy Production, Defying Beijing
– WikiLeaks Documents Hint of Slick Plans for Arctic Oil
– Danish warship sails into Greenpeace Arctic oil protest
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it’s understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.
Is the central assertion of this book – that world economic growth is over – already disproved? How else to explain China’s continued exuberant expansion, or signs of recovery in the U.S. in 2010?
