Energy Policy

Transition Training and Consulting: a day with Norfolk County Council

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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.

ODAC Newsletter – Apr 2

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World Energy ministers met this week in Cancun for the latest session of the International Energy Forum. The meeting resulted in a declaration committing its 66 signatories to an “enhanced global producer-consumer energy dialogue”. As if on cue, the oil price reached its highest point in 2010 on Wednesday at over $83/barrel…

China’s global shopping spree

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Think of it as a tale of two countries. When it comes to procuring the resources that make industrial societies run, China is now the shopaholic of planet Earth, while the United States is staying at home. Hard-hit by the global recession, the United States has experienced a marked decline in the consumption of oil and other key industrial materials. Not so China.

 

‘Britain’s Appalachia’ engineers a brighter post-coal future

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The sparkling, sanitized waterfront of Cardiff, Wales, reveals barely a hint of the country’s grimy industrial past. Where one of the busiest ports anywhere once shipped Welsh coal out into the world, a complex of upscale shops, pubs, and restaurants now dominates the area. Out are the sailors, brothels, and seedy watering holes. In are tourist-friendly pubs, fusion restaurants with names like ffresh, and a circus carousel. The locally favored Brains brewery (“People who know beer have Brains”) has survived nearby.

Shale Gas Shenanigans

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In the years leading up to the crash of the Housing Bubble in 2006 and the subsequent financial meltdown in 2008, there was no shortage of people telling us America’s continued prosperity was not in jeopardy. All that talk was nonsense, of course. In 2010, the situation is eerily similar in the natural gas business. We are told that we have 100 years of supply, implying that we will still be producing cheap shale gas long after the oceans are devoid of fish. As in the pre-Housing Bubble days, a few skeptics are crying foul. There are underground rumblings that things are not on the up & up with shale gas.

“We Have Solutions in Hand: an interview with Dr. Michael Webber”

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I think we can solve this problem. If we look at it from an engineering or technical perspective, we have solutions in hand that we can build out in the next decade that would reduce our carbon dramatically. We could double our nuclear, we could double our natural gas for electric power, ramp up wind and solar dramatically while cutting back our coal use 80 percent…Just because we could do it as engineers with off-the-shelf technology that exists today within a decade does not mean that the policy, economic, or cultural hurtles are not real.