Chris Nelder’s Notes on the 2009 ASPO-USA Peak Oil Conference (pdf)
These are merely my notes from the conference. I hope they will be useful to others as an index to the volumes of material that were covered.
These are merely my notes from the conference. I hope they will be useful to others as an index to the volumes of material that were covered.
-Will rising oil prices derail the recovery?
-Banks Hasten to Adopt New Loan Rules
-Finite Resources: One Possible Explanation for the Financial Crisis
-What Is Inflation and How Does One Measure It?
-They can make this rally last for years
Not many years from now, there will be a huge uproar over who missed the coming of peak oil. There will be Congressional hearings and much finger pointing and protestations that the peaking of world oil production was impossible to predict.
-UN links climate with hunger
-Hungry for change
-The Links Between Food Security And Climate Change
-Agriculture in the Climate Change Negotiations, Platform Issue Paper
-The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it
-Promoting climate-smart agriculture
A recent front-page report by the British newspaper, The Guardian, is the latest reason why Canada needs a top-level analysis of global hydrocarbon supplies. The Guardian’s November 9th story is headlined “Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower.” The story focuses on the world’s top energy monitoring and forecasting body, the International Energy Agency (IEA).
-The most recent economic downturn is a peak oil recession
-Oil: future world shortages are being drastically underplayed, say experts
-Oil reflects dollar moves, not market dynamics: Yergin
-Is the world awash in oil?
The truth is that we have at least two central problems (the economic one is tied to both in the long term), and only people who can get their mind around the combined difficulty will have anything useful to offer. Yes, we need to know how what fossil fuels are in the ground – and we also can’t burn them rapidly. Yes, we need to address climate change – and we need to stop lying and claiming that we can have it all – a happy growth economy based on renewable energy, yada yada.
A weekly review including:
– The day of the whistleblower
– A New focus for the World Energy Outlook
– Production and prices
– Oil and the recovery
– Quote of the Week
– Briefs
For several years, Gazprom has had surpassingly bad PR — worse even than Exxon, which since the 19th century heyday of John D. Rockefeller has almost proudly disdained the opinion of the world at large. The main problem has been Gazprom’s intrusion into the lives of its neighbors — its routine shutoff of gas to Georgia in the 1990s, for example, and its long reluctance to lease pipeline space for the export of natural gas from land-locked Kazakhstan, both actions that happen to coincide with the desire of Moscow to keep a foot on the throat of these former Soviet republics.
In the Happiness Hypothesis , psychology professor Jonathan Haidt compares human brain/behavior to a man riding an elephant. There exists a complex choreography between our newer rational cortex (the ‘man’), and our older, more primitive brain structures (the ‘elephant’).
Colin Campbell, one of the worlds preeminent depletion analysts, and co-author of the 1998 Scientific American article, “The End of Cheap Oil“, drafted a reply to the Guardian on these issues. Below the fold is Dr. Campbell’s letter, which gives some relevant history as to how the oil depletion debate has unfolded over time in the worlds energy agencies.
It is well over a decade now since environmental concerns became pressing enough to command attention in almost all realms of intellectual and practical affairs, and well over four decades since environmental ethics developed as a recognizable field of study in response to a growing set of global problems. Yet in contrast to this broad trend, environmental concerns have remained at the farthest margins of bioethics. As improbable as it seems, bioethics has remained tuned out and disconnected from the ecological realities of our current world.