Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Lloyd’s hired Chatham House to prepare a white paper on the risks of peak oil called Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic risks and opportunities for business. It seems to me that this new report gets quite a few things right, but it misleads in the direction of thinking things are better than they really are, when it comes to timing and alternatives.
-Fools’ Errand: Effort to Shut Down Gulf Well is Failing
-U.S. allows Gulf well to remain closed despite seep
-BP Caps Well: What Happens to Oil Spill Ravaged Gulf Coast Now?
Two regular contributors clash: oilpatch engineer Martin B. Payne and long-time peak oil activist and writer, Jan Lundberg, publisher of Culture Change. In this article, Martin Payne steps back and gives full voice to “the enlightened fossil fuel professional.” Interestingly, the dividing line between activist and oilman is not as sharp as first appears.
– FT: Wall St and peak oil
– BP and the peak: delusions of oil grandeur persist
– ASPO-USA vs Lovins: Optimism, harsh realism, and blind spots — 10 years later
– The Nation: Kicking the oil habit
BP has reported that its latest attempt to cap the leak at its Macondo well has stopped the flow of oil into the ocean. The news has so far been greeted with cautious optimism while integrity testing on the cap continues. The development comes at the end of another torrid week for BP…
A midweed roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-The Oil Market Report
Luke Skywalker had to master the ways of the Force to save the galaxy. We face a similar challenge — mastering the ways of energy, which are surprisingly counterintuitive to people raised in current ways of thinking — in order to make use of the limited options still open to us in an age of declining energy supplies.
On July 12th, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar issued a “Decision memorandum regarding the suspension of certain offshore permitting and drilling activities on the Outer Continental Shelf.”
-Why the tech revolution isn’t a template for an energy revolution
-Right Wing Thought Police – An Analysis
-The Iranian Threat
-U.S. ads call for Alberta boycott
-Population explosion scrutinised as scientists urge politicians to act
-US Company Set to Ship Billions of Gallons of Water from Alaska to India
-The Drowned World
It’s quite nearly universally accepted that the easy-to-reach, cheap oil has been extracted – but is this also the case with Canada’s much-touted oil sands? The startling suggestion has been made by economist and author Jeff Rubin, blogging on the Globe and Mail business pages. He writes that the price of oil must rise in order for Albertan oil to be economically sustainable, as future expansion will be chasing supplies buried deeper underground and further from the available water supply.
One of the striking controversies about the massive BP Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout has been alarm raised about chemical dispersants used to hold spilled crude oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Prospects for oil’s direct harm to the environment, the economy, and coastal society were immediately obvious. But why were people so concerned that dispersing the oil was bad—worse than allowing it to come onshore? Is this just a case of “out of sight, out of mind” to benefit the oil company, or are there larger benefits that reduce the harms to other interests?
