Deep thought – Apr 28
Can we give up cars, as the Japanese once gave up guns?
Daniel Quinn interview
Education
Energy analysis – Apr 24
The energy return of nuclear power
Water needed to produce various types of energy
Business as usual
Reassurances that the energy economy will return to normal sometime soon miss a crucial detail – for the last century or so, the role of energy in the industrial world has been anything but normal. Just how distorted has the age of cheap abundant energy left our expectations and assumptions?
United States – Apr 21
Al Gore – New thinking on the climate crisis
Obama, Clinton woo coal vote in primaries
Obama’s response on oil money
Government as the trustee of common assets
Deep thought: energy – Apr 16
Review: Energy in Nature and Society
Hansen’s letter to governor Gibbons of Nevada (fossil fuels and climate)
EROEI series: Tar sands and shale oil
The specialization trap
One of the lessons of history is that the advantages of economic specialization and centralization are paid for by drastic risks when a society enters the downslope of its history. Our society, more specialized and centralized than any before it, faces more extreme risks — but there are steps that can be taken to counter those risks, if we choose to take them.
Climate – Apr 11
Logging boreal forest could detonate massive ‘carbon bomb’ – report
Teaching climate change
Jim Hansen, the big ice melt and the mainstream media
Converging Environmental Crises: free online conference April 10
A teach-in on energy, climate change, water, agriculture and population. National experts will gather for a conversation on the state of our planet’s health. Several Energy Bulletin contributors will be speaking. (Free webcast).
Master Conservers
For those who lived during the last round of energy crises, grain shortages and the surging price of crude oil bring back memories of the Seventies. Some of the responses to that earlier time of troubles may offer useful tools for the round now looming over the industrial world.
Peak oil – Apr 2
Why EROI matters
Soaring energy costs ‘to change how society operates’ says former Woolworths chief
The accidental environmentalist (Matthew Simmons)
Net energy and Jevons’ Paradox
Discussions of net energy often miss the energy costs of distributing energy and putting it to its end use. These systems costs pose a major challenge to some proposed alternative energy sources, but they also offer support for an old but neglected response to today’s energy predicament.
Confessions of a peak oil writer
I’ve come to accept that my influence is going to be very limited. The trick is not to let frustration hamper your ability to do a job you still consider important. While we can be encouraged by the example of the geologist M. King Hubbert, we don’t have 30 years to get this peak oil problem straightened out.
