Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Keystone XL Is Back on the Table—for Now
– IEA warns high oil prices threaten global economy
– Oil’s getting harder and harder to come by
– Ugo Bardi: Peak E-Cat
– The questionable safety of life extensions for Russian nuclear power plants
Have rising oil prices just put the final coffin nail in the entire 2009-2011 economic recovery?
Given the slowdown in China, the new recession in Europe, and the rocky bottom in the US economy, it certainly seems that way.
– NYT: Defying Police Crackdown, Kazakh Protests Continue
– The Massacre Everyone Ignored: Up To 70 Striking Oil Workers Killed In Kazakhstan By US-Supported Dictator
– Kazakhstan: Riots Not Prelude to Arab Spring
– Seeing Revolution Everywhere: the ‘Kazakhstan Spring’ That Isn’t
The results of OPEC’s latest meeting to set oil production quotas were announced this morning. Instead of production targets for individual countries, a group production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day was set. This amount is a bit less than OPEC produced in November 2011 (actual 30.367 mbd), according to its reckoning, and less than it would have produced most of 2011, if Libyan production had stayed on line, based on the amounts shown in its November Oil Market Report.
For generations, human development has been fuelled by ever greater amounts of energy. The discovery of fire by our earliest ancestors allowed them to harness the energy stored in plants to keep warm and to cook. Agriculture is essentially a means of diverting sunlight into crops to provide easily accessible food. Farming liberated people from the daily hunt for sustenance, and allowed populations to grow. Exploitation of coal fuelled the industrial revolution and the development of urban societies. Oil for transport, and the development of electricity systems enabled modern society, with its ever increasing consumption and mobility. Energy use and social progress have been inextricably linked. Until now. Now, it makes sense to use less energy, not more.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Europe
-Iran
-Iraq on its own
-IEA’s December oil market report
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Many people who know about climate change know little about peak oil. Many who know about peak oil dismiss climate change. Why? How can two problems have roughly the same cause, potentially major global consequences, and be understood so poorly? Why do some people dismiss one and not the other? Is one group right and the other wrong? I’d like to take a shot at explaining this mystery from a few angles.
Welcome to our second annual list of the top ten peak oil books. Most of them are explicitly about peak oil, while others deal with energy depletion as a significant factor in the economy or the environment.
The big oil news this week was that OPEC came to an agreement – albeit a bit of a fudge– showing something of a recovery from June’s “worst meeting ever”. Last time around the group failed to agree new quotas and was upstaged two weeks later by the IEA releasing strategic reserves to offset loss of production from Libya.
There are many uncertainties to how a European collapse might unfold, but Europe is at least twice as able to weather the next, predicted oil shock as the United States. Once petroleum demand in the US collapses following a hard crash, Europe will for a time, perhaps for as long as a decade, have the petroleum resources it needs, before resource depletion catches up with demand.
Europe is ahead of the United States in all the key Collapse Gap categories, such as housing, transportation, food, medicine, education and security. In all these areas, there is at least some system of public support and some elements of local resilience. How the subjective experience of collapse will compare to what happened in the Soviet Union is something we will all have to think about after the fact.
As I type this, Big Oil’s representatives in the House and Senate are pushing legislation that would rush approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Up until now, President Barack Obama has stood strong, threatening to reject any bill that includes the pipeline.
But in the last hour, some terrible news has begun to leak from Washington, D.C.—President Obama seems to be on the verge of caving on Keystone.
– Shock as retreat of Arctic sea ice releases deadly greenhouse gas (methane)
– Lundberg to McKibben: Combatting the “jobs” argument for the XL pipeline
– Guardian on climate conference: sometimes inching forward looks like progress
– Thoughts on Bruce Sterling: It gets boring being a Cassandra (Bardi)
