Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The slide presentations have been posted from the recent symposium on Climate and Energy: Imperatives for Future Naval Forces, sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and the Centre for Naval Analyses (March 2010). This review examines three of the presentations which focused on oil supply problems.
A weekly review including:
– Production and prices
– The volcano
– Update on the droughts
-Ritter OKs bill on natural-gas power plants
-Three themes emerge from Algeria’s gas exporters’ meeting
-Gas exporters push for prices to be linked to crude
-A contrarian makes another call – this time, natural gas
-UK natural gas storage: The politics, and the pundits
Earth Day Network is organizing a huge event on the Mall in Washington D.C. on April 25. The goal is to demand tough, effective climate legislation and a swift transition away from 19th century energy sources.
A number of commenters to my previous post argued that I’m being unfair to Earth Day – of course, there’s greenwashing. of course people are cashing in, but underlying the greenwashing, there’s something good and serious and worthwhile there and I’m being churlish to deny it.
We currently live within an integrated complex globalised economy. We have framed the process in which this occurs as a catastrophic bifurcation, driven by a series of reinforcing positive feedbacks. The final point will be a de-globalised (localised) economy of much reduced complexity.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Isolating Iran
-Defense turns pessimistic
-Energy stat of the week
-Briefs
The notion of ‘peak demand’ is often invoked to suggest that the US or global economy is somehow less in need of affordable oil today or that Americans are simply finding car ownership passé. But is this really the case? Are we weaning ourselves from dependence on oil? The statistics paint a more nuanced story.
Steve Sorrel, Senior Fellow, Sussex Energy Group, University of Sussex in the UK has recently published a 25 page paper called Energy, Growth and Sustainability which can be downloaded at this link. This post provides some excerpts from the paper, which summarize its findings. Readers are encouraged to read the entire paper.
“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.” Such is the summary not of ODAC, ITPOES or ASPO, but of the United States Joint Forces Command…
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-International Energy Agency
Concerns are mounting about peak oil, and there continues to be much debate over when the peak will be reached, whether a plateau can be sustained or whether the onset of decline would occur quickly, whether we will hit peak demand before we hit peak supply, etc.
