Fossil Fuels

Review: Life Without Oil by Steve Hallett With John Wright

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“Imagining a world without oil” describes in stark detail what might happen if one day the world decided to decommission all its oil tankers, rigs, pipelines and strategic reserves. The authors, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright, expect that we’d initially see sky-high prices and long lines at pumps. After a few weeks, fuel wouldn’t be had at any price and even first-world citizens would struggle to stay fed and out of the elements. This is no Hollywood doomsday scenario—it’s a levelheaded extrapolation from current trends in the fast deteriorating world energy situation. [An essay prefiguring the book originally appeared in The Washington Post.]

At the American Journal of Public Health, experts examine the risks posed by peak petroleum

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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.

Commentary: When technical feasibility doesn’t matter

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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.

ODAC Newsletter – Aug 26

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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.

Arrested at the White House: Acting as a living tribute to Martin Luther King

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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.

How to talk about the end of growth: Interview with Richard Heinberg

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“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.

How I learned to start worrying and hate the tar sands pipeline

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Bill McKibben sure is making a big deal over a commodity piece of oil infrastructure. He and more than 200 climate activists think it’s worth getting arrested to stop TransCanada from building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Sure, tar sands are uber-dirty. But with such a low energy return, won’t high costs just make them go away on their own? That’s what I always assumed. But now I’m starting to think this thing could be bad. Really bad.

Energy and water – the real blue-chips

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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.