Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
East New Orleans is lush and crumbling. Sometimes it feels like the built environment — the convenience stores, sugar factories, distant oil refineries, houses, brick apartments, parking-lot pavement — is no different than the vegetation: all bloom and decay, the life cycle spinning in time lapse.
In a review essay of Matt Ridley’s “The rational optimist” and Mark Boyle’s “The moneyless man”, scavenger and squatter Katharine Hibbert sympathises with alternative living but also wants clear thinking.
When Big Oil breaks ranks, and one partner in a world-class deal accuses the other of gross negligence, you know that fear has overcome the industry. But fear of what? One presumes it’s the permanent loss of future — or even currently permitted — drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico because of the disastrous oil spill, in addition to offshore deals around the world. After all, as I’ve written here before, the primacy of Big Oil rests on its claim to technological superiority.
It is said that profound policy decisions are determining how economic life in the United States will go over the next few years.
Wouldn’t it be great to get advice directly from Herman Daly? It’s no surprise that his speech to graduating public policy students contains wisdom for all of us.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Deepwater Horizon
-Peak oil and the President’s speech
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Jeff Rubin was the chief economist at CIBC World Markets for almost twenty years. He as one of the first economist to accurate predict soaring oil prices back in 2000 and is now a sought-after energy expert. Peak Oil Review caught up to him in Toronto last week. Part 1 of a 2-part interview.
BP’s oil disaster is partly the result of approaches to risk which lead us to believe we know more than we do.
Those who thought the failed Copenhagen climate talks last December were a diplomatic nadir, from which only recovery was possible, are in for a shock. Since then, efforts to refloat the talks have seen a lot of ballast thrown overboard — including most of the scientific underpinnings of a deal to protect the world from dangerous warming. If a deal is finally done, probably in South Africa at the end of 2011, it may prove a diplomatic success but a climatic catastrophe.
-The Costs of Natural Gas, Including Flaming Water
-Marcellus Shale gas drilling put under microscope: Moratorium weighed as towns, people wary of potential mishaps
-Struggle for Central Asian energy riches
-Russia Cuts Gas Deliveries to Belarus
The first half of this essay sketched out the unfamiliar terrain that’s beginning to open out in front of the peak oil community as the concept of hard energy limits seeps back out into public awareness, after thirty years of exile in the Siberia of the imagination where our society imprisons its unwelcome truths. One probable feature of that landscape is the rise of revitalization movements among people in the industrial world.
For some years — and long before the Gulf of Mexico spill — Big Oil has seemed to be in existential peril. These gargantuans have been starved of new resources and wrong-footed by state-owned oil companies like China’s Sinopec and Malaysia’s Petronas, which are also competing around the world for drilling rights. At stake has been not only Big Oil’s good health — after all, how many people really care whether Chevron or Shell thrive, apart from their shareholders? — but also the power of nations. It’s part of narrative of the rise of the East, and the decline of the West.
