Fossil Fuels

Deep thought – Jan 20

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-The Ultimate Oxymoron: Industrial Civilization And Mental Health
– Nicole Foss: We Need Freedom of Action To Confront Peak Oil (video)
– La Niña as Black Swan – Energy, Food Prices, and Chinese Economy Among Likely Casualites
– The Guardian: The population explosion
– Jerome a Paris: Neo-feudalism and neo-nihilism

Energy security

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So what should we do? We must be explicit about why we want good domestic climate and energy policy. Let’s say that it is needed to achieve peace and stability. Let’s say that climate change and competition for dwindling energy reserves are both causes of instability and violence. We should make it clear that there the other causes of instability and violence – like nuclear proliferation and inequality – need to be dealt with too. Finally let’s be very clear that our vision for renewables and good domestic climate policy is totally inconsistent with the dominant approach to security.

The peak oil crisis: it’s not adding up!

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Last week, three official forecasters the IEA in Paris, the EIA in Washington, and the OPEC Secretariat in Vienna, released new forecasts of global oil prices and the availability during the next two years. This may be a critical time for global oil production which is hardly growing at all; and consumption in some parts of the world has been increasing rapidly.

TEQs Tradable energy quotas: A policy framework for peak oil and climate change

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A report launched today by the Lean Economy Connection, commissioned by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil, calls for a nationwide system for ensuring fair and equal access to fuel as energy scarcities develop. The report, entitled Tradable Energy Quotas, sets out a detailed proposal for a scheme which would ensure fair and equal entitlements to fuel and energy under conditions of scarcity, while also guaranteeing that the government meets its commitment to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050.

Freaked out by fracking – Jan 17

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-Shale gas: a provisional assessment of climate change and environmental impacts (report)
-Shale gas moratorium in UK urged by Tyndall Centre
-Warning over UK shale gas projects
-Opponents to Fracking Disclosure Take Big Money From Industry (NEW)

Commentary: On not jumping the gun

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I’m sure we all have our own pet scenarios, and many experts have excellent and credible reasons for believing one of those is more likely than others. I would argue that as a movement, however, peak-oil activists do better to focus on the common outcomes of high, low or fluctuating oil prices, than to try to predict which path energy prices will take. The end-results matter most.

Book review: Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Windup Girl”

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It’s not the apocalypse. And it’s certainly not the Death Star or the planet Tatooine. But The Windup Girl is a compelling vision of our industrial world as it could be in a low-energy future. Paolo Bacigalupi’s techno-political thriller imagines how, in the time after peak oil and economic collapse, global trade could return via airships and GMOs.