Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What would happen if the unthinkable would happen? Author Edwin Black’s threatens not with a slow run-of-the-mill peak oil scenario, but rather an acute (perhaps terrorist-induced?) fuel crisis because of reduced global availability of oil by 5-10% for a period of least a month. Black then goes on to propose A Plan for how the U.S. could cope with such a disaster in his book “The Plan: How to rescue society when the oil stops – or the day before” (2008).
-In Bid to Revive Nuclear Power, U.S. Is Backing New Reactors
-The Nuclear Energy Debate
-Obama’s Nuclear Giveaway
-Controversy mounts in EU over fall-out from biofuel
-British Airways to fly jets on green fuel made from London’s rubbish by 2014
-BA’s biofuels plans mean a lot of garbage: the problem of “peak waste”
Monday night I was having drinks in downtown San Francisco with some seriously smart people—top-level IBM scientists and strategists involved in Big Blue’s Smarter Planet initiative. Given the room’s collective interest in creating smart electrical grids, smart water systems, advanced electric car batteries and other green technologies, the talk naturally turned to how to create sustainable cities.
President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of “clean coal” technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how “to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016.”
-Can Climate Shift the Biology of Ecosystems?
-Arctic sea ice vanishing faster than ‘our most pessimistic models’: researcher
-Snowmaggedon Backs All Climate Change Views
-Time to think small on climate change
-U.N. climate panel needs overhaul, top scientists argue in ‘Nature’
-Saudi Arabia Says Peak Demand for Oil Is an ‘Alarm’
-Virgin’s Richard Branson takes on peak oil
-Oil groups mount legal challenge to Schwarzenegger’s tar sands ban
The best way to influence policy is for the “scientists and engineers” to influence policy makers directly — and you don’t do that in a report, in a letter, on a petition, or a blog. It requires a commitment to face-to-face relationship building, nurturing, and maintenance. Rarely does a policy discussion center solely around facts.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has initiated a review of the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for wood heaters. That might seem like a desperately boring bureaucratic project, and in some ways it probably will be, but after all the hand-wringing and endless haggling is over, the result could be fundamental changes to wood heating technology that could shake the foundations of the manufacturers that make it and forever alter the wood heating experience of users.
A cultural and political revolution will empower us to to carry out a deep and profound retrofitting of industry, government, education, health care, housing, neighborhoods, transportation, food and farming systems, as well as our diets and lifestyles.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-China’s Growth
-India
-Quote of the Week
-Briefs
-America’s Food-To-Fuel Problem
-EU biofuels significantly harming food production in developing countries
-Burn Up the Biosphere and Call It Renewable Energy
-Palm oil deal ‘a threat to the rainforest’
