Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the past twelve months, ethanol exports from the United States have increased from 4 million gallons in March of ’09 to 46 million gallons in March of this year to places like United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Canada, and the Netherlands. This year’s March figure is about 4 percent of the 12 billion gallons mandated for domestic biofuel use this year. Ethanol producers are thrilled.
-Reflections on an Oil Spill: A New Orleans Native Speaks Out
-Fishgrease: DKos Booming School
-Human Health Tragedy in the Making: Gulf Response Failing to Protect People
-Screw the Environment: BP and the Audacity of Corporate Greed
Bear with me. I’ll get to the oil. But first you have to understand where I’ve been and where you undoubtedly won’t go, but Shell’s drilling rigs surely will — unless someone stops them.
Oil spill update for May 24, including:
-What caused the disaster
-EPA weighs sanctions against BP
-Dispersants
-MMS deficiencies in Alaska
-Increasing insurance costs
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Deepwater horizon
-Repercussions
-Sanctions on Iran
-Quote of the Week
-Briefs
While lying awake late at night worrying about what kind of world my children will inherit, I find it helpful to come up with schemas for the most obvious and inevitable of the large societal problems. It makes them seem slightly more manageable to place them in order of importance, or time. Further, being clear on what are the biggest and most important problems is an essential prerequisite to thinking about solutions: these problems all interact, and solutions to the smaller of them may not be radical enough to address the larger of them.
-Dark Mountain: Issue 1
-Natural Regression
-‘Historic’ day as first non-Latin web addresses go live
-The Coming Greenhouse World
-BP bows to demands from Congress and scientists for live feed of oil leak
-Gulf spill reminds America: The era of ‘easy oil’ is over
-How the global oil watchdog failed its mission (1/3)
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
-Iranian nuclear fuel
One of the most stunning outcomes of the now month-long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the utter reversal of corporate images it has generated. At once, Exxon — for two decades tarred as the callous, greedy and dirty culprit in the Valdez oil spill in Alaska — is regarded in expert circles as the squeaky clean, state-of-the-art, cutting-edge model of safe, environmentally friendly oil drilling. And BP — which spent tens of millions of dollars under former CEO John Brown successfully branding itself as the green, publicly interested conscience of the industry — is now the poster child of the devil-may-care, dollar-grubbing, environmentally and labor unfriendly oil company.
-Transit as a Development Tool, but in Whose Interest?
-Better Bikeways: Guerrilla Improvements and DIY Signage
-What’s not to like about high-speed rail? The case simply hasn’t been made
Yesterday, a friend sent me over this graph, which shows the levels of carbon dioxide emitted by the USA over the last twenty years. As the accompanying report explains, it shows that 2009 was an “exceptional” year – exceptional in that emissions levels fell by more than they had fallen in a single year since 1949. The reason? The economic crash.
