Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– ASPO-USA Conference Report: Thursday Afternoon Notes
– The six natural resources most drained by our 7 billion people
– Peak Oil – Herausforderung für Sachsen: Bündnis90/Die Grünen präsentieren Studie des Postfossil-Instituts im Landtag
In a year when chaos is beginning to feel like the norm, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s out of the blue announcement calling a referendum on the latest Euro bailout plan caught even the most jaded observers by surprise. Although it looks as if the idea has now been abandoned, the likelihood of a still more serious financial crisis has surely moved a step closer…
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Nuclear troubles
-US to require details of fracking on federal land
-When Transition meets fracking, and wins. The story of Transitions Cowbridge and Llantwit.
-Exclusive: Fracking company – we caused 50 tremors in Blackpool – but we’re not going to stop
-Fracking protesters storm shale gas exploration site
Did the nuclear power industry ever learn and act upon the “lessons” of Three Mile Island? While it’s true that much has changed in the nuclear field since 1979, it’s also true that the more things have changed, the more they have remained the same…
Thus this 30th anniversary edition is inspired by yet another nuclear catastrophe, the partial meltdown of three reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in March of 2011—the third great nuclear plant accident, following Three Mile Island and the far-worse meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986. This new edition contains the entire text of the 1982 edition of Nukespeak, along with four chapters of fresh material written by two of the three original authors.
There is a fascinating drama taking place over in Bologna, Italy involving an engineer by the name of Andrea Rossi and a physicist, Sergio Focardi, who say they have developed an entirely new source of cheap, clean, energy. This energy is said to be produced by fusing nickel and hydrogen inside a low-cost, table-top-sized reactor. Moreover, the inventors say this device is already in limited commercial production and is being sold to customers with the first delivery being made to an unknown American buyer this week. … If this development is for real, and we will not know for a while, parts of our understanding of nuclear physics will have to be rethought for it seems there is much more in nature to learn about
Wall Street is the best immediate target for a protest against financial inequity and corporate money in politics. Now, as Occupy movements pop up across the globe, Occupiers may be interested to know that big oil companies are as guilty as big banks in buying politicians and squeezing the 99%. And since today’s fiat currency is really based on oil, any reform of finance needs to take on energy too.
One becomes nervous when a consensus begins to form around a Big New Idea — it starts to sound like group think. So what are we to make of the cottage industry developing around the notion that the U.S. not only isn’t facing an impending oil shortage — it is on the cusp of being nearly energy independent, short of a margin of barrels that will be imported from friendly Canada and Mexico?
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The EU debt crisis
-Shortages in China
-Cold fusion test
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Last week we and other representatives of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA (ASPO-USA) stood on the steps of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to call for “Truth in Energy” concerning one of the most serious threats to our economy, national security, and environment: the prospect of an impending decline in world oil supply. The consequences of this milestone are far-reaching and potentially catastrophic. After a news conference at DOE, we delivered a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu summarizing our concerns and requesting answers to specific questions about DOE’s response to this monumental challenge.
At first glance, Jan Lundberg and Amanda Kovattana seem like unlikely kindred spirits. He’s a former oil analyst turned whistleblower and rock musician, while she’s a British-educated Thai émigré who makes her living helping people become organized. Yet their similarities run deep, beginning with a profound concern for the planet and a flair for writing. Indeed, both are indispensable contributors to one of the top news sites on energy and the environment, Energy Bulletin. Both also happen to be accomplished memoirists, and their memoirs offer rare insights into family relationships, the vicissitudes of wealth and the quandary of being an environmentalist in an environmentally apathetic age.
If you live in the United States and bother to turn on your television, it’s almost impossible to avoid ads telling you that natural gas from shale is both abundant and environmentally safe to develop. In these ads, so many happy people seem to enjoy burning natural gas that it would be difficult to imagine that their smiles might come to a premature end.
