Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Familiar echoes in shale gas boom
-‘Fracking’ risks found to have been diminished (Report)
-Medical Records Could Yield Answers On Fracking
-Water safe in town made famous by fracking-EPA
-Shale causes rise in waste gas pollution
-Obama Warms to Energy Industry by Supporting Natural Gas
Today, the levers of Macroeconomics, the economic devices traditionally used as control levers for national economies, are broken or blocked.
It’s time to start up new strategies with new content and media, set in a new scale, the human scale.
“It’s no pipe dream. The U.S. is already the world’s fastest-growing oil and natural gas producer. Counting the output from Canada and Mexico, North America is “the new Middle East,” Citigroup analysts declare in a recent report.”
Jeffrey Brown responds: The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) sums the reported production from Texas producers, and it has been doing so far decades, while the EIA apparently uses a sampling approach to estimate Texas production. For annual production in 2011, the RRC shows Texas crude oil production at 1.12 mbpd (million barrels per day), while the EIA shows it at 1.46 mbpd, a gap of 340,000 bpd. The gap between the RRC and the EIA for monthly production is even more pronounced, on the order of about 500,000 to 600,000 bpd.
If the EIA is this far off for Texas, what about the other producing states, and what does it say about the EIA’s global data?
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The EU at a crossroads
-China slowing
-IEA’s monthly report
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
With the exception of the French oil company Total, the International Oil Companies (IOCs) have denied concerns about the impending decline in world oil production, often called “Peak Oil.”
Some possible explanations for the IOC position are as follows…
The story of a remarkable man who fought during his youth to leave farming behind—only to lead a revolution in the way we grow and distribute food.
This narrative that comes out of the city and is widely repeated, is demonstrably untrue. It is a much more complicated and nuanced picture than that. I would argue that if you have a system that remains unregulated and uncontrolled, you’re going to store up even bigger problems in the future. I think if you did start to regulate banks and banking properly, not just in an offshore sense but in terms of, you know, capital requirements and all sorts of other things, you would end up having a much stronger, much healthier economy. In fact, there is historical evidence to suggest that this is the case.
-Americans would pay more for green energy
-Carbon capture leak simulated in sea off Scotland
-US claims ‘unprecedented’ success in test for new fuel source
Fears of a new phase in the European debt crisis, a decline in oil imports to China in April, and the prospect of a new round of international talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have seen oil prices drop back from recent highs in the past two weeks. Despite all this however, and reports from OPEC that it bolstered supply by 320,000 barrels in April, Brent oil still stands around $112/barrel.
Much of what we believe, and much of what we are trying to change, is rooted in the terminology, the language we use to discuss it. If we want to change our own ideas, beliefs and worldviews, we need to stop using that terminology, because it leaves us anchored in the paradigm we are trying to escape.
The deep, transformative changes sketched in the first half of this manifesto provide a path to America the Possible. But that path is only brought to life when we can combine this vision with the conviction that we will pull together to build the necessary political muscle for real change.
I spent my Easter weekend this year in an exciting meeting of social movements focused on rejecting the debt at source: on conducting a series of Citizens’ Audits to ascertain exactly how we came to be in this disastrous position and to ask the question, Who really owes to whom? And why should the tiny percentage of the super-wealthy continue to extract such a vast share of the common wealth of nations? This is empowerment as an alternative to austerity.
