Industry

Review of National Commission Working Paper #6, “Stopping the Macondo spill”

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From the report: “The containment story thus contains two parallel threads. First, on April 20, the oil and gas industry was unprepared to respond to a deepwater blowout, and the federal government was similarly unprepared to provide meaningful supervision.

Second, in a compressed timeframe, BP was able to design, build, and use new containment technologies, while the federal government was able to develop effective oversight capacity. Those impressive efforts, however, were made necessary by the failure to anticipate a subsea blowout in the first place.”

Can energy retrofit loans bring wonderful life to economy?

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America is beginning to look a lot like the dark “Pottersville” vision in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey is shown a town where the middle class has been destroyed and lives in poverty under the thumb of evil Big Banker Henry Potter. Bailey’s heroic efforts to help the middle class saved Bedford Falls. America can help the middle class prepare for energy shortages with energy retrofit loans — or funnel billions to Potter-like promoters of Too Big to Fail energy projects. Where’s that angel Clarence when we need him most?

It’s official: The economy is set to starve

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Once a year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) releases its World Energy Outlook (WEO), and it’s our tradition here at ChrisMartenson.com to review it. A lot of articles have already been written on the WEO 2010 report, and I don’t wish to tread an already well-worn path, but the subject is just too important to leave relegate to a single week of attention.

Energy – Nov 21

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– BBC: Oil shock warning to government from UK business
– Protect us from peak oil, says Richard Branson (and others)
– Big names warn of danger of UK’s ‘addiction’ to oil
– Steve LeVine: Peak or no peak?
– Ken Deffeyes: IEA on Board, Sort Of
– IHS CERA study says oilpatch costs rising

‘Peak coal’ to see prices soar (interview with Richard Heinberg)

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This week, science journal Nature says the world is on the verge of exhausting its cheap coal supplies. With rising demand and dwindling supplies of high quality usable coal, prices could be much higher by the end of the decade. The finding could also have implications for the controversial technology, carbon capture and storage. ABC (Australia) reporter Greg Borschman interviews Richard Heinberg.

Straight Talk with James Howard Kunstler: “The world is going to get rounder and bigger again”

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The world is going to get rounder and bigger again. We’ll discover — surprise! — that the global economy was a set of transient economic relations that obtained only because of a half century of cheap energy and relative peace between the big nations.

Review: The Impending World Energy Mess by Robert Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling

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In The Maltese Falcon a character tells detective Sam Spade, “By Gad, sir, you’re a character, that you are! Yes, sir, there’s never any telling what you’ll do or say next, except that it’s bound to be something astonishing.”* I’m telling Bob Hirsch the same thing. There’s no denying the man’s considerable credentials within the energy industry, nor his contribution to peak oil scholarship as principal author of the first major U.S. government report to take the issue seriously. But neither is there any predicting what outlandish thing he’ll propose next in his efforts to spread the message.

A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save it – A review of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s latest book

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Anyone who has spent much time discussing peak oil, the collapse of civilizations, climate change or modern security issues eventually confronts the issue of historical antecedents. The [Insert choice of vanished civilization here] collapsed because of X, and that’s the same thing that is happening now . . . . For those who have delved more deeply into such lines of argument, one thing becomes abundantly clear: historical civilizations did not collapse for a single reason. Fast-forward to present, and there is no shortage of commentary forecasting crisis or collapse of our modern civilization. But these analysts have failed to advance a comprehensive systems-theory approach to our civilization’s troubles. Enter Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.