Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One of the saddest aspects of the Internet is that it so often fails to make us smarter. In a mutant version of Gresham’s Law, loud amateurs too-often drown out the voices of experts. Here we an excerpt from a 1975 book that tells us more about Peak Oil than a typical dozen posts on most peak oil websites. [Excerpt from Sir Ronald Prain’s classic “Copper: the anatomy of an Industry”]
– Aleklett’s new book: “Peeking at Peak Oil”
– Economist James Hamilton on “Fundamentals, speculation, and oil prices”
– Has Peak Oil Come To The Non-Opec World? Maybe. (Forbes)
The September issue of the American Journal of Public Health is now available online featuring 8 studies and articles by an interdisciplinary set of experts, each examining the health risks posed by peak petroleum and what can be done to mitigate and protect against the onset of a major spike in energy prices.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Restarting Libyan exports
-The Keystone pipeline
-Gas in the Marcellus shale
-Quote of the week
Briefs
One of the hardest concepts for many Americans to absorb is this – that technical feasibility rests on a complex bed of other feasibilities and never stands alone. Thus, simply observing that it is technically possible to, say, create zero impact cities or to run our cars on corn waste does not usefully tell us whether we are going to do so or not. This historical reality stands in stark contrast to the perceptions that many of us have, which is that technology operates as a kind of vending machine into which one puts quarters and gets inevitable results.
As rebels take Tripoli, foreign powers are eyeing the prize of Libya’s high quality crude oil. There are vast oil spoils to distribute. The Libyan oil industry produced 1.6 million barrels a day prior to the war. The country is thought to have 46 billion barrels of reserves – the largest in Africa.
The war in Libya entered the endgame this week: fighting continues, and fierce pockets of resistance remain, but oil companies are already queuing up to get back into action. Estimates vary on how quickly, and indeed whether Libya can return to its 2010 production capacity.
We may not be facing the same dangers Dr. King did, but we’re getting some small sense of the kind of courage he and the rest of the civil rights movement had to display in their day — the courage to put your body where your beliefs are. It feels good.
“Traditional” economic measurements and the dominant paradigm no longer work in a world of peak debt, peak energy and peak disasters. Can a new way of talking shift things? My interview with Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute on his latest book The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. He’s diagnosed the problem. Now, how to communicate the issue to everyday folks and policy makers? Heinberg weighs in.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Restarting Libyan production
Todays prices and costs provide a very bad basis for making investment decisions because they reflect temporary relative market scarcities rather than long-run underlying physical ones. The world needs to abandon money as its measure for determining energy and economic policy if it is to invest its scarcest, most limiting resources in the best possible way.
This week the USGS released a new assessment of gas resources in the Marcellus Shale, Appalachian Basin. The rerport is a reasonable effort by the USGS to sort out some of the wheat from the chaff.
