Fossil Fuels

Job Losses Push Need for Energy Bill

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Millions of job losses are pushing the U.S. Senate to consider a Jobs and Energy bill, even though Cap and Trade appears to be on life support. What are Five Key Measures that must be in a new Bill to avoid being a “half-ass..d” effort? (term from Sen. Lindsey Graham descrbing limited climate bill)

The Oil Crunch: a wake-up call for the UK economy (report excerpt)

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On 10 February 2010 at the Royal Society, six UK companies – Arup, Foster + Partners, Scottish and Southern Energy, Solarcentury, Stagecoach Group and Virgin – joined together to launch the second report of the UK Industry Task-Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES).

Delusions of Finance: Where We are Headed

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Back in October, I participated in the 2nd International Biophysical Economics Conference at SUNY-ESF in Syracuse, New York. Charlie Hall had written to me, inviting me to come and give a talk. Specifically, he wanted me to go back to my post from January 2008 called Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008 and explain why my forecasts had turned out pretty close to correct, while many others widely missed the mark. The title he suggested for the talk was Delusions of Finance.

Beyond Copenhagen – Now what?

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Are current corporate-dominated international institutions inadequate to the task of meeting the multiple planetary survival challenges they themselves have helped create?…Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute (postcarbon.org), talks about the factors contributing to the stalemate in the Copenhagen climate summit, the other ‘game ending’ challenges confronting the current economic system, and the bottom-up steps necessary to move to a post-carbon economy.

Characterizing the incalculable

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It is simply impossible to assign a clear, calculable probability to any scenario for climate change or future oil supplies. The best we can do is to characterize the incalculable. But, by knowing the range of presumed outcomes, we can start to characterize the effects and therefore gauge the probable severity of any particular outcome.

ODAC Newsletter – Feb 5

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In a busy week for energy policy, UK energy watchdog Ofgem finally acknowledged what has been obvious for years: that liberalized markets cannot deliver energy security in the era of carbon reduction and resource depletion.

Entropy revisited

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One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.