Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There are simply too many people out there who will never sit through a talk or read a book of non-fiction about our energy situation, but who would read a novel that lays the issues out clearly in the language of fiction. Cobb took on this project, not to write a best-selling novel, but to write the kind of book you can give to your sister-in-law who won’t read the other books you want to give her!
So, last night CBS hauled Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, on board their flagship Sunday infotainment vehicle, 60 Minutes… McClendon told the credulous Leslie Stahl and the huge viewing audience that America “has two Saudi Arabia’s of gas.” Now, you know immediately that at least half the viewers misconstrued this statement to mean that we have two Saudi Arabia’s of gasoline.
With the election frenzy behind us, and the Fed printing money like there’s no tomorrow, it seems like a good time to return to the shale gas “boom” in the Marcellus.
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.
For those addicted to more roads, airports and the sweet smell of gasoline, the IEA’s 2010 World Energy Outlook includes some pretty sober reading.
Market-based ownership models have damaged the public and social interest. Innovation is inevitable.
My goal in writing Prelude was to help to create a self-reinforcing spiral of awareness, to break out beyond the peak oil community, beyond even the sustainability community, and to reach people who know little or nothing about such issues.
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.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-World Energy Outlook 2010
-China
-Briefs
-Quote of the week
I am the editor and developer of the first Brazilian website focusing exclusively on Peak Oil – Pico do Petróleo – which was launched in the beginning of 2010. The site is a non-profit initiative and its content consists almost entirely of Portuguese translations of posts found on the Internet. My main source is the Energy Bulletin, which I have been following since 2006, when I first learned about Peak Oil.
“The energy world faces unprecedented uncertainty”, so begins the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, released on Tuesday. The annual report from the energy watchdog guides the energy policies of OECD member countries including Britain.
Many people seem to believe that it is possible to have a rapid transition to a “low carbon economy,” based on a totally different pattern of production of energy carriers (using different primary energy sources) and a totally different pattern of consumption of energy carriers, while still guaranteeing the same set of end uses.
