Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Until 1 January 2010 Sweden holds the presidency of the EU. This means that Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is head of the EU-delegation that today travels to the USA for a summit on climate between the EU and the USA on Wednesday. Reinfeldt will meet president Obama today and can then present the offer that the EU nations agreed on last week.
Oil prices vacillated this week, falling back from their recent high on news of unexpectedly large US inventories, later rallying as the US economy officially emerged from recession…
-Rainforest treaty ‘fatally flawed’
-Fewer Americans View Global Warming as a Problem
-Government launches map to highlight global warming threat
-Arctic Sediments Show That 20th Century Warming Is Unlike Natural Variation
-Betting the Farm
-UN chief will pressure senators on climate bill
For more than half a century, neoclassical economics has provided the basis for the vast majority of economic advice offered to governments by their paid advisers. A great deal of that advice has been disastrously misguided, and the problems with the neoclassical synthesis that feed into that torrent of bad advice make the same outcome all but unavoidable in dealing with peak oil.
Critique of October, 2009 issue of Scientific American essay: Squeezing More Oil from the Ground
-Oilwatch Monthly October 2009
-A post-oil world gets less sci-fi by the day
-The Truth About Energy
-Global oil supply: Separating fact from fiction
-Biofuel Displacing Food Crops May Have Bigger Carbon Impact Than Thought
-Biofuels rather than electric cars to meet renewables target
-Tanzania Suspends Biofuels Investments
-Who says it’s green to burn woodchips?
-Carbon advantage of biofuels may be overstated
-Wall Street’s Naked Swindle
-Where Will the Jobs Come From?
-New School of Thought Brings Energy to ‘the Dismal Science’
-The greatest theft in American history
-Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?
-Revolutionizing Economic Thought
Even as we’ve been going through years of hand-wringing about security of supply, and about how Russia was an unreliable gas supplier, it comes out the European gas buyers are themselves increasingly refusing to pay the price that underpins the security of their Russian supplies, and are breaking their contractual obligations towards Gazprom, making Europe, erm, a less reliable customer…
Much passionate concern is flying around regarding the United Nations meeting on climate this December in Copenhagen. We hear it from honest activists and from politicians who sound trustworthy on this most crucial matter. An example is Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Great Britain, who deserves a prize for eloquence in warning us of climate change.
“Peak oil can be a very tricky topic, the way I talk about it and deal with it at the end of the day is: We need to revolutionize the way we consume and produce energy… We need to really be the leaders in saying: the future for our children and our grandchildren as far as energy consumption and as far as production, it looks like this” with those words Colorado Governor Bill Ritter started his closing speech at the ASPO conference in Denver that took place from 10 to 12 October 2009.
This week ODAC welcomes the publication of two important reports. In its excellent Heads in the Sand report, Global Witness provides one of the clearest summaries of the peak oil issue to date, including a trenchant critique of the IEA’s position…
