Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As many Americans retreat to air-conditioned environments to get out of the heat, the flame increases under our limited freshwater resources. The electrical energy used to create our comfort zones requires massive withdrawals of water from our rivers, lakes and aquifers to cool down nuclear, coal and natural gas power plants.
-Exxon: ‘Losing Our Shirts’ on Natural Gas
-Shale Gas Reality Begins to Dawn
-The Sky Is Pink: New Josh Fox Video On Fracking Controversies in New York (and Much More)
-Obama’s Interior chief: State regulation of fracking ‘not good enough for me’
-Ed Davey urged to take ‘foot off the gas’ and focus on renewables [Report]
-Gazprom Biggest Loser As Shale Gas Upends World Markets
Global oil consumption increased by 0.7 percent in 2011 to reach an all-time high of 88.03 million barrels per day, according to new research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute for its Vital Signs Online service. This rate of increase was considerably slower than in 2010, when oil consumption rose by 3.3 percent following a decline of 1.3 percent in 2009 due to the global financial crisis.
There’s an interesting divergence between the extreme complexity of the predicament that besets contemporary industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the remarkable simplicity of the failures of reasoning that have sent us hurtling face first into that predicament, on the other. Nearly all of those failures share a common root, which is the inability—or at least the unwillingness—of most people in the modern world to pay attention to the natural cussedness of whole systems.
– Peak-Oil is now! (true but there is some delay due to unconventional oil and gas)
– Plateau Oil now! (true, since 2005 at just above 80 Mb/d, but not for very much longer as the potentials of unconventional oil and gas are extremely limited)
– The precise moment of PO is not so important anymore, as we are probably already at or closely before the peak according to many.
[Great summary]
Oil production capacity is surging in the United States and several other countries at such a fast pace that global oil output capacity is likely to grow by nearly 20 percent by 2020, which could prompt a plunge or even a collapse in oil prices, according to a new study by a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School (Leonardo Maugeri, a former oil industry executive).
– The Potential Upside of Captivity
– The Death of Petro-State Risk
– Is Peak Oil Dead?
– Dave Cohen: Should We Still be Concerned with Peak Oil?
West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which had been selling for $105 a barrel at the end of March, fell to $80 a barrel last week, while Brent has come from $125 down to near $90. These price declines will translate into substantial savings for U.S. consumers in the weeks ahead.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
-Conferences
-Ten to Follow On Twitter
-Five Featured Videos
Every week another article comes out arguing that peak oil is dead and that we are in a new era of liquid fuel abundance. In the first of a series Andrew McKay takes on the authors of these overly optimistic puff pieces and explains paragraph by paragraph exactly why these people are so wrong.
Americans are reading, almost on a daily basis, about increasing oil and gas production in the US. For example, Daniel Yergin wrote about his optimistic outlook for increasing US oil and gas production in an OpEd piece in the June 10, 1012 New York Times entitled “Americas New Energy Reality.”
It’s certainly true that US oil and gas production has rebounded from the production low following the 2005 Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, but a careful analysis of the production data suggests that the production outlook it not quite as rosy as most people seem to believe.
There’s a lot going on in the TV show The Walking Dead that’s worthy of comment, but there’s one aspect of the show that has struck me in particular- that the civilization we’ve built and have come to depend on, could be undermined in short order, returning us quickly to a survivalist state of nature.
