Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Fairness, Personal Action and Al Gore’s House
-Do Panels Dispense Advice or Rationales?
-Unschooling & Unworking: Confessions of a stay-at-home family (Part 2)
-COP15: Climate ‘scepticism’ and questions about sex
-Can Obama Stop America’s Gas-Guzzling Ways?
Right now, on two different fronts, political progressives face a horrible choice: Accept a severely compromised political agreement or stick to their guns and run the risk of getting nothing. Sure, this is a recurring question for activists and advocates of all stripes but—unlike the so-called “death tax”—in these two cases the question really is a matter of life or death.
“as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold”
-This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity
-Oil sands emissions polluting waterways, study finds
-Brown offers £1.2bn in a bid to break climate deadlock
-A Second Life For Orbiting Carbon Observatory?
-Sunspots do not cause climate change, say scientists
-Cooling the Asphalt Jungle
-‘At this rate, Copenhagen will be a disaster’
To stop the climate crisis, we’re going to have to build a fairer world.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Baghdad’s second auction
-Climate change
-The IEA’s peak
-Briefs
There is a huge amount of oil which theoretically can be extracted, but the question is whether the cost will be cheap enough for us to be able to afford to extract it. If the oil is too expensive to extract, the shortage of oil seems to cause a recession, similar to what we are having now. I discuss this in purely monetary terms, but it is also an issue with respect to low energy return on investment (EROI), for those of you used to thinking in EROI terms.
Abstract: In recent years, several published reports have assured the public that all is well with the global petroleum supply, citing new oil-production technologies and a record-high oil-reserve figure. Oil production has exceeded demand since late 1997, driving oil prices downward. Global oil consumption, however, is continuing to increase while new oil discoveries decrease…
In a commentary published in The Times this week to coincide with the Copenhagen climate talks, Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency wrote that on existing energy demand projections “the world faces the prospect of a peak in conventional oil production in about 2020…
Many energy experts, politicians on both sides of the aisle, and representatives of the coal industry agree on the need to spend billions to develop technologies to capture and store the carbon from burning coal, thus making coal “clean” from a climate standpoint.
The IEA has pretty much conceeded peak oil, announcing that growth to meet demand in the coming decades will come from entirely mythical sources. Ok, they didn’t say that, what they said in the latest World Energy Outlook was that the majority of oil production by 2030 will be coming from “fields yet to be developed or found.” But what that means is “we’re hoping someone with magic powers will come and reverse the long-stand trend towards decline in oil discovery.”
Although world oil production is likely to start declining in the next few years, followed by world coal production in another 20 or so years, neither of these are likely to reduce emissions enough for many decades to have much of an impact on increasing carbon emissions. The decline in world oil production and much higher prices are likely to have a major impact on economic growth however.
