The API Opposes New Fuel Standards, EPA Deluded
As a subscriber to the Oil & Gas Journal, lots of email alerts roll into my inbox. But sometimes there’s a missive startling enough to actually get my attention. This is one of those times.
Consumption & Demand
Officials Wake Up To Peak Oil, Part 1
When I began writing about peak oil professionally in 2006, it was generally considered a tinfoil hat theory. The notion that oil production might peak around 2012, plus or minus, was only taken seriously by a few analysts who were considered extremely pessimistic.
It’s a gas – Apr 6
-Dash for Poland’s gas could end Russian stranglehold
-Natural-Gas Data Overstated
-BP fights to limit controls on shale gas drilling
Solar greenhouses, Chinese-style
In Europe and North America, eating fresh perishable produce out of season usually means hauling it in refrigerated containers from regions where it’s in season, or growing it locally in heated greenhouses…Although these greenhouses boast extremely high yields, the amount of fuel needed to heat them generally far exceeds the amount that would be needed to haul an equivalent amount of produce from a region where it’s in season.
Horseradish trees and hummingbirds
Some of the species of life that share this planet really want to be our friends, and have gone to great evolutionary lengths to prove it.
Increasing Global Nonrenewable Natural Resource Scarcity—An Analysis
During the pre-recession years of the 21st century, we experienced wide-ranging nonrenewable natural resource (NNR) scarcity on a global scale for the first time. Supplies associated with an overwhelming majority of the global energy resources, metals, and minerals that enable our industrialized way of life failed to keep pace with increasing global demand during the 2000-2008 period, resulting in global NNR supply shortfalls.
Peak oil review – Apr 5
A weekly review including:
– Production and prices
– China shifts on Iran
– A busy week in Washington
– World Energy Conference
– Quote of the Week
– Energy Stat of the Week
– Briefs
Children, the childless, and diverse human ecosystems
Parents love their childless friends, often their only source of grown-up activities like, say, uninterrupted conversation. Or drinking and shooting pool (mmm…). Plus they’re good babysitters! Unchilded people love having relationships with kids. Children love hanging out with adults who are independent and adventurous; they need uncles and aunties. Human communities are ecosystems, and in all ecosystems diversity is the key to health and resilience.
“Possum Living” author steps out of the shadows
In the late ‘70s, at the age of 18, and with a seventh-grade education, Dolly Freed wrote Possum Living about the five years she and her father lived off the land on a half-acre lot outside of Philadelphia. Known for its plucky narration and no-nonsense practical advice on how to live frugally while keeping up a middle class facade, at the time of its original publication, Possum Living became an instant classic. Following her success as an author, Dolly Freed grew up to become a NASA aerospace engineer. She aced the SATs with an education she received from the public library and put herself through college.
Another post-oil-novel roundup
Review of two recent additions to the post-petroleum literary canon:
– Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
– Crossing the Blue by Holly Jean Buck.
Three Spring Edibles
Spring has sprung, which means it’s time to stop hiding from the environment and start consuming it. Even now, months before the berries arrive, there are plenty of tasty morsels to be had in forests and by streams.
Transition Training and Consulting: a day with Norfolk County Council
It was with some fear and trepidation that Alexis Rowell, a Camden Borough councillor and the author of the upcoming Transition Guide to Local Authorities (LA), and I arrived in a deeply conservative part of the country, Norfolk, to do a day with them on peak oil, climate change and the Transition town model and practice.
