An American Chernobyl
The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore.
Fossil Fuels
Inconvenient? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (book review)
Get used to it, baby: if there were an easier available place to find new oil than a mile beneath the sea, they’d be drilling there. The accident in the Gulf of Mexico, however damaging it is already, however widely it may spread, is minor compared with what is happening, invisibly, above our heads. That’s the message of Bill McKibben’s new book, Eaarth, and what he’s been warning about for over two decades.
Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website launched today!!
It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website. The site makes the full version of the UK’s first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.
Let the hollow media optimism sound a warning
Occasionally you come across an anti-peak-oil polemic that’s so self-defeating that it makes you wonder if our problems might not in fact be a lot greater, and more urgent, than you had previously considered.
Peak oil, prices, and supplies – May 4
-BP Fought Safety Measures at Deepwater Oil Rigs
-Toyota’s Bill Reinert on Peak Oil
-How Bad Is the Oil Spill? Ask the Pelicans
-Asean members try to forge agreement on oil and gas rich Spratly Islands
-Track the Gulf of Mexico oil spill movement in animated graphic
-Response options for BP oil spill
China’s coal bubble…and how it will deflate U.S. efforts to develop “clean coal”
The conventional wisdom in energy-and-environment circles is that China’s economy, which is growing at a rate of eight percent or more per year, is mostly coal powered today and will continue to be so for decades to come…Most of this conventional wisdom is correct, but some of it is plain wrong—so wrong, in fact, that environment-, economic-, and energy-policy wonks are constructing scenarios for the future of U.S. and world energy, and for the global economy, that bear little or no resemblance to the reality that is unfolding.
Industry leaders seem to be showing more openness to energy descent issues
I’ve spent the last two days at the Institute for the Future’s Ten-Year Forecast retreat in Sausalito, CA…At this retreat, I introduced ideas relating to peak net energy, and the possibility of major changes in the years ahead. I found industry leaders much more open than I had expected to listening to and understanding our energy predicament, and talking about what may be ahead. In this post, I would like to tell you about my experience.
Worse than 1789?
Senator Levin pretty much had Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS’s head of sales and trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their billion-dollar investment “products” as “one shitty deal.” Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called “family” newspapers and cable TV networks would have to report it. And just to make sure nobody missed the point, the senator repeated that phrase at least twenty times before the day was over.
Optimism versus reality in peak oil media battle
The optimists may have long been winning the peak oil media battle – as Matt Simmons observes – but we are beginning to see information coming out on the business pages that allows us to piece together a more balanced story. Right now, much of this focuses on everyone’s favourite cause for optimism, the oil sands…But do the facts support this rampant enthusiasm? I’d suggest not.
The next oil price shock
A few years ago I made a graph illustrating my view of the timing of future oil price shocks. I’ve updated that graph to reflect the current price, but I haven’t changed my mind about the timing of the next blow-up. Here it is.
Peak oil and the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico
It is amazing that there always has to be a catastrophe before the media will take up an issue even though we researchers showed that there would be a problem already back in 2003. The question is whether the opportunity now exists to make Peak Oil a global political question?
Oil spills, crime waves and the increasing militarization of American life
The involvement of the U. S. military in many civilian tasks seems in some ways logical. But that is just the problem. We are shaping public policies and priorities so that the resources to perform these tasks are increasingly unavailable to the civilian federal agencies or to the state and municipal governments responsible for them. Starved of tax revenue or congressional appropriations, these entities have turned to the military for help.
