Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The following question ought to be an obvious one to anyone who knows that Canada imports 43 percent of the oil it consumes: Why isn’t there any discussion of a new pipeline to eastern Canada where most of the oil consumed is imported?
To minimal serious coverage in the media and on the internet, the Nord Stream was inaugurated in Lubmin on Germany’s Baltic Coast on Nov. 8 in the presence of Pres. Medvedev of Russia and the prime ministers of Germany, France, and the Netherlands, plus the director of Gazprom, Russia’s gas exporter, and the European Union’s Energy Commissioner. This is a geopolitical game-changer.
What is Nord Stream? Very simply, it is a gas pipeline that has been laid in the Baltic Sea, going from Vyborg near St. Petersburg in Russia to Lubmin near the Polish border in Germany without passing through any other country. From Germany, it can proceed to France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Great Britain, and other eager buyers of Russia’s gas.
– U.S. to Delay Decision on Pipeline Until After Election
– Is the Pipeline Victory a Turning Point for the Climate Movement
– Bill McKibben on pipeline delay: We won, you won
– Depressing climate-related trends – but who gets it? (bad trend in arctic sea ice)
– Paul Krugman on solar innovation: Here Comes the Sun
– Solar Power and its Discontents
– Five challenges facing the energy sector in 2012
– ‘Tipping Point’: A primer on the Alberta tar sands
Sonoma County can have both green energy and lower rates. The key is to focus on building local solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable resources, and focusing on making all aspects of the energy system, from generation to con sumption, more efficient.
If you live in the United States and bother to turn on your television, it’s almost impossible to avoid ads telling you that natural gas from shale is both abundant and environmentally safe to develop. In these ads, so many happy people seem to enjoy burning natural gas that it would be difficult to imagine that their smiles might come to a premature end.
If one can’t rely on Daniel Yergin for soothing reassurances about the state of the global oil market, who you gonna call?
Since 2005, Yergin and his associates at CERA have massively reduced their projected rate of increase in Global Total Liquids “capacity.”
A much-trumpeted partnership of one of today’s most celebrated scientists and the world’s largest publicly traded oil company seems stalled in its aim of creating mass-market biofuel from algae, and may require a new agreement to go forward. The disappointment experienced thus far by scientist J. Craig Venter and ExxonMobil is notable not only because of their stature, but that many experts think that, at least in the medium term, algae is the sole realistically commercial source of biofuel that can significantly reduce U.S. and global oil demand.
– The Depression: If Only Things Were That Good
– Adjusting the economy to the new energy realities of the second half of the age of oil
– The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy
The world is doomed to repeat four-year cycles of booms followed by crashes if we don’t get off oil, Jeremy Rifkin warned a Climate One audience in San Francisco on October 3. The solution, what he calls the Third Industrial Revolution, is the “Energy Internet,” a nervous system linking millions of small renewable energy producers.
Daniel Yergin has written The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, designed to provide information that policy-makers can rely upon in shaping energy policy for the decades ahead.
This could be a dangerous reliance, for Yergin is an advocate for the fossil fuel community, not an honest broker of information. Nearly all the data cited in the book is from his company and is proprietary and non-public, so it can’t be verified or challenged. He doesn’t appear to take seriously the views of people he doesn’t agree with, and they are not included in his extensive bibliography or interviewee list.
We have a well known problem called the “Fermi Paradox”. If all those extra-terrestrial civilizations exist, then could they develop interstellar travel? If there are so many of them, why aren’t they here?
Tim O’Reilly may have been the first to note, in 2008, that the Hubbert curve may be relevant for the Fermi paradox. Because of the non linearity of the curve, no matter what resources are being used, a civilization literally “flares up” and then subsides, being able to maintain the highest level of energy production only for a very short time. This phenomenon that we might call “The Hubbert Hurdle” may be very general and make industrial civilizations in the galaxy to be very short-lived.
