Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Oil, natural gas, and alternatives dominate the headlines when it comes to energy. But there’s a big and largely-overlooked revolution occurring with the energy source likely to become the most preferred fuel for a world in economic decline: coal.
As many Americans retreat to air-conditioned environments to get out of the heat, the flame increases under our limited freshwater resources. The electrical energy used to create our comfort zones requires massive withdrawals of water from our rivers, lakes and aquifers to cool down nuclear, coal and natural gas power plants.
Every week another article comes out arguing that peak oil is dead and that we are in a new era of liquid fuel abundance. In the first of a series Andrew McKay takes on the authors of these overly optimistic puff pieces and explains paragraph by paragraph exactly why these people are so wrong.
Jeff Rubin is currently touring his new book, The End Of Growth. As the former Chief Economist for CIBC World Markets he brings an intimate knowledge of financial markets and how they work to the peak oil/end of growth community populated by other venerable thinkers such as Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson and John Michael Greer.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The EU crisis
-Iran
-Retail gasoline prices
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Power generation from coal is falling quickly. According to new figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal made up 36 percent of U.S. electricity in the first quarter of 2012 — down from 44.6 percent in the first quarter of 2011. That stunning drop, which represented almost a 20 percent decline in coal generation over the last year, was primarily due to low natural gas prices. As EIA explains, natural gas generation will climb steadily this year, while coal will see a double-digit drop by the end of 2012…
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The EU at a crossroads
-China slowing
-IEA’s monthly report
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-the Iranian confrontation
-The EU’s spreading crisis
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
In this post, I consider the limited impacts of climate policy on fossil-fuel production and discuss estimates of fossil-fuel production in the long run.
In its quest to find new sources of energy, China is increasingly looking to its western provinces. But the nation’s push to develop fossil fuel and alternative sources has so far ignored a basic fact — western China simply lacks the water resources needed to support major new energy development.
Five forces have helped enable long-term economic growth, we are now reaching limits in all of them. Thus, while these factors have tended to create growth in the past, the same factors cannot be relied on to produce growth in the future. In fact, they may lead to a turn around in the not-too-distant future.
Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.
