Energy Policy

ODAC Newsletter – Sep 3

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A report by the German armed services (the Bundeswehr) on the implications of peak oil on national security was leaked to the internet this week and picked up by Der Spiegel. The report, which was produced by the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Centre, acknowledges that peak oil will happen, and that while estimates of the timing vary it could be any time from 2010 with the impacts on security likely to be felt 15 to 20 years later.

Bjorn Lomborg: performance artist extraordinaire

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One of the most successful performance artists of the 21st century has returned to the stage—and we’re not talking about Lady Gaga here.

Instead, I draw your attention to Bjorn Lomborg, who has just unleashed a dramatic reverse back-flip of his stance on global warming that may very well restore him, at least briefly, to the heights of the media firmament he first enjoyed in 2001, when he announced his apostasy from his (alleged) environmental roots with the publication of the global best-seller, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

A world in collapse?

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I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief. We humans have been given a privileged place in a world that is beautiful beyond description, and we are destroying it and destroying each other. I cope with that by building temporary psychological damns and dikes to hold back that grief. … If I weren’t politically active, I would lose my mind. The only way I know how to cope is to use some of my energy in collective efforts to try to build something positive.
(Interview with journalism professor at U of Texas)

Review of Brenda Boardman’s Fixing Fuel Poverty

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Brenda Boardman continues to do pioneering work in the field of fuel poverty in Britain. She is Emeritus Fellow with the Lower Carbon Futures at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Twenty years ago, Boardman wrote her landmark study, Fuel Poverty: From Cold Homes to Affordable Warmth, which provided the first quantifiable definition of fuel poverty (ie. when a household spends more than 10% of its income on energy services).

German military study warns of a potentially drastic oil crisis

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A study by a German military think tank has analyzed how “peak oil” might change the global economy. The internal draft document — leaked on the Internet — shows for the first time how carefully the German government has considered a potential energy crisis. (excerpts)
Update: English translation of table of contents and lead paragraphs.

A summary of Adam Brandt’s “Review of Mathematical Models of Future Oil Supply”

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This paper has two goals. First, it provides a systematic review of oil depletion models produced to date. This serves to make obscure past works (often difficult to find) available to a wider audience so as to limit repetition of past efforts. Second, this paper provides synthesizing critique of previous modeling efforts, with the aim of improving future oil depletion modeling.

Personality profile: Do you “go with the flow” or do you “stock up” just in case?

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The balanced personality would want three things: 1) That we have a reasonably large stockpile of critical goods in case of a temporary disruption of flows, 2) that what we rely on for our survival be by and large renewable, and 3) that our demand for renewable resources would come into balance with the supply we can reasonably expect–considerably less than fossil fuels have provided us.

ODAC Newsletter – Aug 27

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Cairn Energy announced this week that it had found evidence “indicative of an active hydrocarbon system” off Greenland. The news comes in the middle of a bidding round for oil and gas exploration licences there. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that the region contains approximately 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, but producing the stuff would combine the extreme challenges of deepwater drilling, extreme cold, and ice. Any accident would be massively harder to deal with than Deepwater Horizon because of the country’s remoteness…